Dozens of Android phone owners are reporting on social media that a photo showing a lake, a dark twilight and a green coast is turning off their phones when used as 'wallpaper'.

Some brands seem to be affected, including Google's Samsung and Pixel.

The error causes the screen to turn on and off constantly. The BBC does not recommend trying it.

Samsung will complete a maintenance update on June 11th. The BBC has contacted Google for comment, but there is still no response.

A Twitter post on the issue has received thousands of likes and new reprints, with some reporting that their phone has also been affected.

Technical journalist Bogdan Petrovan at the Android Authority said the error did not affect the Huawei 20 Pro, but it caused the Google Pixel 2 to malfunction.

"After placing the image in question as 'wallpaper', the phone went off immediately. He tried to reset it, but the screen kept turning on and off, making it impossible for the security screen to switch," he said.

Rebooting the device, holding down the volume button, did not fix the problem. "It seems to affect some but not all devices running the latest version of the Android operating system, Android 10.

The launch of Android 11 was supposed to take place this week but has been postponed.

No official reason has been given for the virus, but its developer Dylan Roussel, who writes on '9to5Google', posted his theory on Twitter.

Ken Munro and Dave Lodge who are partners of the security firm 'Pen Test' also analyzed it for the BBC.

"While digital photos have improved in quality, phones need to control what the 'color space' of the image is to work how to display it properly," they said.

"It's how a phone knows exactly how to display the right shade of green, for example."

"There are different ways to determine the color space. Some spaces have specialized uses in graphic design, so sometimes you will see images that are not in the usual" Standard RGB "format. It is also possible to create them on purpose. images that have more information on color than some devices can handle.

"What has happened here is that the way some phones deal with these cases has gone bad. The phone goes off because I don't know how to handle it properly and computer software developers probably didn't think it could happen. "