Factory That Made Samsung Galaxy Note 7 Batteries Catches Fire (Yes, Really)

Image courtesy of Samuel M. Livingston

It sounds like something straight out of The Onion, but it’s true: A factory in China that manufactured batteries for the now-defunct Samsung Galaxy Note 7 line of phones — all recalled due to their propensity for the batteries to burst into flame — itself suffered a fire this morning.

As Bloomberg reports, a fire broke out this morning at a plant for Samsung SDI Co, in Tianjin, China. Samsung SDI was indeed one of the two battery suppliers for the Galaxy Note 7.

A spokesman for the company told Bloomberg that the “minor fire” did not affect production, and that the fire actually occurred at a waste depository and not at a production facility.

Meanwhile, a Forbes contributor gathered photos of the fire from Chinese social media site Weibo, showing gouts of black smoke billowing into the sky from behind a screen of trees.

Tech site Digital Trends notes that fires at electronics manufacturing facilities are not exactly uncommon, pointing to to a 2011 explosion at a Foxconn plant in China; a 2014 fire at a circuit board plant in South Korea; and a 2016 fire at a different Foxconn plant, elsewhere in China.

And yet somehow it all feels very fitting, in an absurdist sort of way.

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