I2C Bus Recovery Brief I was working on a project where we had a problem with an I2C bus that was sporadically hanging during communication with a certain device. I2C works with open-drain lines, which means that devices can only pull the lines low, and a pull-up resistor is used to pull the line high. If a device misbehaves and holds one of the lines low, the bus will be stuck, and no further communication can take place.