According to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), there have been more and more cases of Apple AirTag trackers malfunctioning in recent weeks. The malfunction is probably due to the protective function of the devices, which prevents them from being abused by stalkers or scammers.

The nearby tag protection system will notify owners of iPhone and Android smartphones (in the latter case, you need to install a special application and perform a manual scan) of their presence, if it is observed for too long. However, in recent weeks, mostly at night, iPhone users have started receiving signals about the detected “stray” AirTag, according to the WSJ. And their location is clearly wrong – a few straight lines on the map due to the user’s location.

The Verge source added that sometimes there are other types of malfunctions: the security system reports that a tracker belonging to the owner of the phone has been detected, but marks the device as unknown. The issue has also been confirmed on the Reddit community. A similar glitch was sometimes observed even with AirPods earphones, but Apple seems to have dealt with it with the latest update.

The WSJ material talks about a situation where a security system was triggered by the presence of a tag, but was never actually forced to steal a signal to detect it and was not present in the FindMy system either.