The Tame Apple Press has gone into meltdown faster than the Note 7 on a US airliner after some of the recalled phones also caught fire.

The company late on Monday said it was asking all telecom carriers and retailers that sell the Note 7 globally to stop everything. Major US carriers started doing that already. Consumers with either an original or a replacement Note 7 should power down and stop using the device, said Samsung.

It looks like Samsung stuffed up the diagnosis of the original problem. The first recall was said to be over a faulty battery from one of its suppliers. Samsung said it stopped using that supplier and replaced all the batteries in an expensive recall.

Verizon Communications Chief Executive Lowell McAdam on Monday said the recall was “a major black eye” for Samsung.

“This is by far the biggest concern I have seen in mobile phones during my tenure,” said the CEO—a veteran of the wireless business since the 1980s—at an industry conference in Menlo Park, Calif. “In my however many years in the market I have not seen a recall like this,” McAdam said.

Some analysts are expecting Samsung to kill off the Note 7 completely. This is mostly because the brand is forever tainted and partly because by the time they work out what has gone wrong with it will be time to launch the new model.

The price tag for the stuff up is huge. Some analysts think it will be as high as $15 billion. What is really sad is that it might actually have given Apple its get out of jail free card. Apple released its iPhone 7 with no real difference between that and the earlier models and with no useful headphones. On an ordinary day such a product would sink without a trace.