Why did my note 8 reset on its own to the initial setup?

[Android Central Question]

my note 8 just randomly went off and went I turned it back on it was the initial setup all over again. I have had this phone for over a year. It is asking me to setup all over again with my gmail.

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! Unfortunately, this kind of thing has been known to happen. Spontaneous factory resets are probably due to some catastrophic firmware glitch. Hopefully you were keeping your important data backed up or synced on a regular basis, because anything that was on the phone's Internal Storage has been presumably wiped (although data on the SD card should still be there).