iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max owners in South Korea, the United States, and China are reporting sudden reboots during everyday use. Most incidents happen while authenticating with Face ID or paying with Apple Pay. Apple has not issued a public statement, and guidance from its own service centers has reportedly been inconsistent.
The pattern is being called a “panic full” by affected users. That’s the label an iPhone gives itself when its kernel hits a fatal error, force-halts, and automatically restarts. The restart leaves behind an analytics log. Seoul Economic Daily and BigGo Finance both compare it to a Windows “blue screen of death.” It’s a record that something crashed, not a diagnosis of why.
Posts describing these incidents have circulated since around September 18 on Asamo. It’s a Korean community with roughly 2.4 million members for iPhone, iPad, and Mac owners, according to industry sources cited by Seoul Economic Daily. The most common trigger described is a failed Face ID check inside a banking app, Photos’ Recently Deleted folder, or Apple Pay. That’s typically followed by a “please try again” prompt, then an automatic restart.
“I’ve used iPhones for 10 years and this was the first time I got a panic full, so it left me uneasy and I asked for a refund.”
That line comes from Seoul Economic Daily’s English-language write-up of an Asamo user’s Korean-language post. The outlet’s own translation policy notes that quotes from Korean sources are AI-translated and may not preserve exact original wording. Other posters described getting an exchange approved at a service center. One said an Apple Store employee told them the issue could be software-related, before processing a refund.
Seoul Economic Daily and BigGo Finance both report similar accounts surfacing on Reddit. One U.S. user described roughly five forced reboots on an iPhone 18 Pro, mostly during Face ID attempts, with a panic-full log each time, and one incident reportedly caught on video. Another said their iPhone 18 Pro Max rebooted three times during Face ID use and once loading Apple Wallet, all within 24 hours of buying the phone, then rebooted again during Apple Music even after a factory reset. These Reddit accounts weren’t independently verified beyond how the two outlets describe them.
Chinese outlet mydrivers.com reported the same pattern separately, citing a tech YouTuber who examined a reader-submitted iPhone 18 Pro and confirmed a panic-full event had occurred. Apple Korea has declined to comment. Seoul Economic Daily says Apple is understood to be looking into the situation, though it’s unconfirmed whether the cause is hardware or software.
BigGo notes a related but separate wrinkle: the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max moved their Face ID infrared camera under the display this year. Notebookcheck has found that matte or anti-reflective screen protectors can scatter that camera’s infrared pattern, which alone can cause Face ID to fail. BigGo is explicit this is a distinct accuracy problem, not confirmed to be linked to the panic-full reboots.
This isn’t unprecedented. The iPhone 16 series drew similar forced-reboot complaints shortly after its 2024 launch, and Apple resolved them with an iOS 18.1 update. Owners who suspect they’ve hit this issue can check for themselves. Go to Settings, then Privacy & Security, then Analytics & Improvements, then Analytics Data, and look for a log beginning with “panic-full.”
A phone in the iPhone 18 Pro’s price range randomly restarting during Face ID or Apple Pay is more than an annoyance. Those are the exact moments a phone is supposed to be most reliable. Until Apple confirms a cause, affected buyers are left choosing between an exchange, a refund, or waiting on a fix. Going by the iPhone 16’s precedent, that fix may eventually arrive as a software update. There’s no official guidance to point to right now, even as Apple ships other firmware fixes for the iPhone 18 Pro Max.
Sources: Seoul Economic Daily, BigGo Finance, mydrivers.com
