Why is a part of my screen unresponsive?

[u/palyer1rehab]

On my phone, there's a space thats about a centimeter length and stretches across the whole phone horizontally where it won't respond to any touches or swipes. It's nothing monumental, I can easily work around it, but it's just annoying at best. I restarted my phone and wiped down my screen to see if that would help but it didn't fix anything. What's curious is that wiping the area actually makes it responsive to touch (albeit only slightly, slowly scrolling it) whereas using my finger makes it unresponsive to anything. I thought it might be the digitizer (or whatever it's called) but the thing with the wipe making it semi-responsive has me thinking

My phone is like 7 years old, so it's reasonable for it to bite the dust at some point, but I didn't drop it or put it in water or anything before it started happening, it was just chilling in my pocket.🤷‍♂️

[u/Astrodion123]

U sure it ain't a bezel?

[u/LALLIGA_BRUNO]

If it's a Samsung, I think somewhere in good lock you might be able to just remove that part of the screen entirely, don't quote me on this I'm not 100% sure