Is this a known issue?
You would definitely want to stop doing that or permanent damage might happen.
The casing is grounded and pressing it makes contact with the internal components, causing a short.
It’s known and not recommended to apply force intentionally.
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Yeah, that doesn’t look good to me either 
This is just the way this component module is made. It is not designed to have any force applied to the shield. There is no way to change it and this is not considered a defect by the module manufacturer (which is not Particle).
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it is also fairly common to many of the small boards that have shields. my 3 omega 2+ boards do this as well as several esp32 & esp8266 & a couple pine64 padi stamp modules. most of them don’t require the pressure the OP was using on his module.
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good to find this issue. i just happened to run into this too.
i cannot imagine this to be anything else than a design flaw. particle should consider this a defect and send the modules back to the manufacturer. vibration, temperature, humidity, acceleration or manufacturing tolerances may become a problem and cause resets.
i have a module where this happens with only a light touch.
i would like to know why they did not put an insulation in between?
While that might be true, no such case has been reported so far for as long as they've been available, as far as I'm aware. The only cases in which this has been reported, are the ones like above, where force is manually applied in places where it (obviously) shouldn't be. Like many things, functionality might be disturbed if used incorrectly.
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of course, who knows if this issue (soft metal cover without insulation) is of any importance. i really cannot say. i just did not expect to see this. these modules are also not supposed to be used in automotive, extended temperature or rugged inudstrial applications. therefore it might be ok.