Furious Google Pixel 4 owners claim an update has broken their face unlock system

Owners of the Google Pixel 4 phone have claimed a recent update has ‘broken’ their face unlock system.

This security mechanism unlocks the device by scanning its owner’s face.

But on Reddit and Google support forums, angry owners have said it’s no longer working after they installed a software upgrade.

Last week on Reddit, one person wrote: ‘Got my new Pixel 4 a week ago and the face unlock was working fine, then today my face unlock stopped working for seemingly no reason.

‘It comes up with the message posted in the title on the lock screen when trying to unlock the phone with face unlock. As well as this, when attempting to delete the face unlock data in settings, the button greys out stating the message “Cannot verify face.” making it impossible to delete the data.’

‘I have attempted rebooting in safe mode and retrying, but to no avail. Is anyone else having this hardware issue? I’m hoping it’s not just me. Am I going to need to replace my handset? So incredibly frustrating, I really don’t want to have to replace it after all the time it took for me to set it up.’

Another person also wrote: ‘Anyone else having issues with their camera and face unlock? Mine stopped working a few hours ago. Up to that point it had been working great for me.’

This might sound like bad news, but there’s a silver lining.

If the problem was caused by a software upgrade, it can be fixed by another. If the bug affects enough people, Google is likely to fix it as a priority.