A video of a cruise passenger spotting someone’s nightmare scenario—dropping a phone on the very edge of a ship at sea—unfolding aboard a Royal Caribbean cruise has gone viral on TikTok.
The moment of the drop was witnessed by Abby Morris, a 24-year-old personal care assistant based in Michigan who is applying for medical school. Morris shared a video that showed a phone sitting on the ledge of a boat on her TikTok account @abbythepremedrunner. The clip has amassed 687,000 views since it was posted on July 18.
Text overlaid on the clip says “Just hoping that whoever dropped their phone onto the ledge of this massive cruise ship see this,” while a caption adds “sorry you’re cooked bud.”
Morris told Newsweek that the footage was captured on July 18 on the Icon of the Seas cruise ship, which traveled to St. Thomas of the U.S. Virgin Islands, St. Martin, and CocoCay in the Bahamas from July 11 to 19.
She said: “My cousins and I were sitting on the 12th floor balcony looking at the water and we saw it fall from a floor below us. We weren’t sure which one.”
“It was on the absolute ledge of the ship below any of the balconies/rooms. We didn’t see the person who dropped it, but we did let our cleaning person know about it,” Morris noted.
According to the poster, the phone was still there after dinner that day but they didn’t check to see if it was still there the following day.
Cruises are more popular than ever. Ocean cruise passenger volume hit a record 34.6 million travelers in 2024, marking a nine percent rise from 2023, according to a 2024 report by the Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA).
The CLIA noted: “Set against the backdrop of approximately 1.4 billion total international arrivals worldwide, the cruise industry accounts for less than 3 percent of global tourism, a focused yet powerful slice of the market.”
Viewers on TikTok could relate to the panic that the phone drop would have caused for the owner of the device.
User @cr1sttianhart said it is “My biggest fear” and @warrior_princess_ simply wrote “Noooooo.”
User katlyn said: “That would quite literally ruin the whole trip for me..” and @bowiekion asked “are they lucky or unlucky.”
User @medicine.and.miles wrote: “Omg my fight or flight response just kicked in.”
User @rango_7263 said: “My toxic trait is me thinking I could climb all the way down to it, put it in my pocket, and climb back up.”
Newsweek has contacted Royal Caribbean for comment via email.
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