OnePlus 7 Pro owners get strange spam notifications on their phones

The Chinese phonemaker "accidentally sent out a global push notification."

Sean Keane Former Senior Writer

Sean knows far too much about Marvel, DC and Star Wars, and poured this knowledge into recaps and explainers on CNET. He also worked on breaking news, with a passion for tech, video game and culture.

Expertise Culture, Video Games, Breaking News

See full bio

Sean Keane

July 1, 2019 3:23 a.m. PT

OnePlus had a weird moment on Monday.
Érika García / CNET

If you got a strange OnePlus 7 Pro push notification on Monday, you're not alone. Owners of the Chinese phones rushed to Twitter to express their concerns over a pair of garbled messages -- one of which appeared to be Chinese characters and other in the Latin alphabet.

@oneplus Did someone sleep on their keyboard?#OnePlus7Pro pic.twitter.com/DCrQWAU3aO
— Shrey Srivastava (@ShreySri) July 1, 2019

Trying to follow the link apparently resulted in a "browser not found" message. The issue is seemingly only affecting the OnePlus 7 Pro, which came out in May.

"During an internal test, our OxygenOS team accidentally sent out a global push notification to some OnePlus 7 Pro owners," the company wrote in response.

Its team is investigating what happened and the company promised to share more details "soon."

Watch this: Tips and tricks for the OnePlus 7 Pro

02:03

OxygenOS is a customized version of Android developed by OnePlus and the odd notification caused some people to worry about the security of their data, harking back to a 2017 incident where a security researcher found that personal data was being sent to OnePlus servers.

It responded by explaining how people could opt out of data collection and promised to stop gathering data like "telephone numbers, MAC addresses and Wi-Fi information."

First published at 2:46 a.m. PT.
Updated at 3:23 a.m. PT: Adds more detail.