Hot Phone Incident
The Hot Phone Incident was an incident that occurred on November 29, 2021 during the Hype House Arc. Daniel went live on TikTok expressing his frustration about his phone overheating and the temperature, which ultimately escalated in a meltdown toward the end of the stream. [1]
Background
Daniel started a livestream on TikTok and talked about various things, such as Grace supposedly helping him out and delusions about her being "pregnant". During the stream, his number was leaked and he receives many spam calls and around 4 minutes in, he begins to complain that his phone is overheating and worries about waking Gavin up. As more spam calls come in, Daniel becomes increasingly angry to the point where he hits himself, smashes a lamp and repeats that he's "fucking had it" and that he is being harassed. A minute later, he has a meltdown, calling Grace a bitch. [2]
Details
As noted above, Daniel's phone number had been leaked to the public. Due to his online infamy, people quickly capitalized on this opportunity to troll him, spamming his phone with texts and calls.
Due to reasons we can't understand, Daniel was unable to to comprehend that he could put his phone on silent mode or mute notifications. This resulted in his phone staring to overheat as notification after notification popped up, resulting in him starting to get irritated.
As noted in other parts of the wiki, Daniel is autistic, and as such has sensitivity issues to certain feelings and sensations. One of them, in this instance, is heat. Daniel, likely feeling overstimulated and angry, broke his lamp as well.
Delusions of VanderWaaline involvement
Near the end of most clips of the meltdown, Daniel is shown angrily telling Grace VanderWaal — whom he has a near-pedophilic obsession with — that she is "a fucking liar" and "should go to fucking hell". Later on, it's presumed he put his phone down due to the up-appearing angle of the video; as this happens, he's heard remarking that "you don't know" and that "you're not here", then saying "you don't know how hot my phone is".
This tells us that, somewhere in the back of his mind, he figures that Grace had organized the incident in some way, or at the very least had been sufficiently rude to him as to deserve an angry diatribe.