You may want to keep your Apple products away from balloons. A systems specialist at Morris Hospital, near Chicago, discovered that helium can actually temporarily kill iPhones and Apple Watches. It all started on October 8th when Erick Woolridge started getting calls that cellphones weren’t working. Writing about his experience on Reddit, he noted that about 40 people with Apple devices were impacted by the issue (they were rendered completely useless.)
At the time a new MRI machine was being installed, and Reddit users replied to his story writing that perhaps the phone issue had something to do with the helium used to cool the new machine. Woolridge investigated, and found a leak had caused about 120 liters of liquid helium to be vented into the building over the course of five hours. He eventually figured out that Apple devices have internal “MEMS-based clocks” that are the” literal heart” of the devices, and when exposed to helium the clocks malfunctioned. To fix this, Apple says you simply let your device “air out” for “approximately one week.”
