Bright floodlights can overwhelm the lens and sensor. Some light is always scattered or reflected inside any lens, and very intense point sources make that scattered light visible as flare, bloom, or glowing halos. On phones, this can be more noticeable because of the small lens design.

Settings can only help so much: if you expose for the rest of the scene, the lights may bloom; if you expose for the lights, the scene will go dark. So there usually isn’t a setting that fully fixes both at once.

What you can try:

• clean the lens carefully, since smudges can worsen flare
• slightly underexpose to reduce highlight blowout
• use highlight recovery or lower highlight contrast if your app supports it
• accept some overexposure in the lights if preserving the rest of the scene matters more

In short, the main cause is the extreme brightness of the floodlights plus normal internal lens reflections/scatter, and camera settings can only reduce—not eliminate—the effect.