https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/gye4aw/why-a-helium-leak-disabled-every-iphone-in-a-medical-facility

Why a Helium Leak Disabled Every iPhone in a Medical Facility
The bizarre incident happened during the installation of an MRI machine
and was a surprise to everyone except Apple.

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Image: Shutterstock

An IT worker at a medical facility made a remarkable discovery about
iPhones and Apple watches earlier this month, after a freshly installed
MRI machine appeared to disable every iOS device in the hospital.

As detailed in a post on the r/sysadmin subreddit, Eric Woolridge, a
system administrator at Morris Hospital in Illinois, was flooded with
calls on October 8 after several iPhones owned by hospital employees all
stopped working for no discernible reason. At the time, the hospital was
having a new MRI machine installed, which is used to make high resolution
scans of the brain.

MRIs work by producing a very strong magnetic field, so Woolridge
initially assumed that the phones were disabled by an electromagnetic
pulse generated by the machine. There was just one problem: an EMP would
have disabled all electronic devices, not just iPhones. Yet when Woolridge
did a tour of the facility, he discovered the issue was isolated to about
40 Apple phones, tablets, and watches. Android phones were just fine, as
was the rest of the computer equipment at the facility.

According to Woolridge, most of the Apple devices in the facility
“seemed completely dead.” Many wouldn’t give any indication of
charging when plugged into the wall and had issues connecting to the
cellular network, but not the wifi.

As Woolridge later discovered, the MRI installation involves supercooling
the giant magnet in the machine by boiling off liquid helium. This
evaporated helium is usually pumped out of the facility through a vent,
but this vent was leaking the helium into the rest of the facility. In
all, about 120 liters of helium (or about 90,000 cubic meters in its
gaseous state) was pumped out of the MRI room and an untold amount leaked
into the rest of the hospital.

Woolridge ran some tests of his own to see if helium could shut down an
iPhone. He placed an iPhone 8+ in a sealed bag and added some helium. In a
video of the test Woolridge runs a stopwatch app on the phone. The
stopwatch increasingly speeds up throughout the course of the video before
the iPhone freezes at around eight minutes. The helium, it seemed, was
messing with the iPhone’s clock.

As detailed in a blog post by the right-to-repair organization iFixit,
helium atoms can wreak havoc on MEMS silicon chips. MEMS are
microelectromechanical systems that are used for gyroscopes and
accelerometers in phones, and helium atoms are small enough to mess up the
way these systems function. Yet both Android and Apple phones use MEMS
silicon for their devices, so why were only Apple phones affected?

The answer, it seems, is because Apple recently defected from traditional
quartz-based clocks in its phones in favor of clocks that are also made of
MEMS silicon. Given that clocks are the most critical device in any
computer and are necessary to make the CPU function, their disruption with
helium atoms is enough to crash the device.

In this case, the leaking helium from the MRI machine infiltrated the
iPhones like a “tiny grain of sand” and caused the MEMS clocks to go
haywire. This isn’t news to Apple, however, which explicitly mentions
that “exposing iPhone to environments having high concentrations of
industrial chemicals, including near evaporating liquified gasses such as
helium, may damage or impair iPhone functionality” in the phone’s
manual.

iFixit has a detailed explanation of how this all works over at its blog.
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Posted on Rocksolid Light.