Called 911 on my Pixel 8 Pro and now call blocking doesn’t work

When you dial 911 for an emergency several things happen with your phone, and one of them is that call blocking and screening gets disabled in case an emergency operator needs to get in touch with you.

At 7:45 today I called 911 as there was a truck bed tool box in I-440 in the middle of the slow lane near the bottom of a bridge over I-65. Now, had this been anywhere but 440 I might have attempted to tackle this myself, but the speed limit here is 55 which meant the slow morning traffic was probably doing 70+ and I had no interest in being squished at high speed. I had also moved to a different lane and was well beyond it before I would have been able to stop, but that’s another story of inertia.

Made a quick call to 911 to get someone with blinky lights out there and after that hung up. All was well until I got my first spam call of the day. Now here’s the thing, with the Pixel 8 I’d pretty much forgotten about telespammers so I manually hit call screen and they refused to answer. Shortly thereafter I got another unknown caller, similarly not blocked or screened, and then another, and at this point I went to investigate.

One of the many notifications I had from the time I placed that 911 call was that call blocking was disabled. I didn’t catch that until two+ hours after the 911 call by going into my historical notifications. I must have dismissed it without seeing it, but it’s there under phone notifications.

In the interim I had rebooted the phone and at this point no unknown number has called so entirely unknown if it’s working correctly post-reboot but will know shortly.

I’ve called 911 many times in the past for road issues that would kill someone, this blocking staying on for any amount of time is new to me. The only difference is newer OS and that I hung the phone up rather than the 911 operator (the call was done).

Unfortunately I can’t trigger a telespammer to test this out and I do not know how to make it so my phone re-screens a caller… my office phone goes straight to ringing. So we’ll see if a reboot fixed it soon I guess.

A reboot did indeed fix the issues. I had to wait until I actually got some telespammer calls to determine that however.