Help I broke strobe light when measuring amperage (acr ms2000 distress strobe)

Hello, could someone with more knowledge on flashlight electronics let me know what I did wrong?

I was wondering how many amps the acr ms2000 strobe uses so I connected the two probes to the battery terminals using the multimeter on 5amp setting, in series, it showed about 1amp but varying. I then tested the strobe by switching it on and off but i noticed it was varying in frequency of the flashes by the angle i hold it at, then after a while I switched it on again and it stopped working altogether. It doesn't work anymore now

I know there is a pcb inside with a capacitor which fills up with electricity then releases it to produce the flash.

Does someone know how I broke it? I didnt know I can short or fry anything, as the tailcap usually acts to connect the two battery terminals, like i did with the multimeter.

thanks

Maybe some sort of pulse surge... but I doubt your connection caused it to fail. You've checked your batteries right? Did you reverse the batteries maybe during testing?

From a very quick look I think there are several potential problems here. Firstly, the strobe almost certainly draws pulsed current from the batteries, which a typical multimeter may not be fast enough to measure correctly. Secondly, your multimeter leads have introduced additional inductance into the circuit. I can imagine that this may prevent the capacitor charging at the correct rate and cause the variation in pulse period that you saw. I don't know whether that was the sole problem. I'm not certain, but I also wonder if this inductance may have been sufficient to create a voltage spike and damage something. I'll give this some thought when I have a bit more time. Thirdly, you need to make sure you have good contact from your multimeter to your batteries. This is probably less critical, but if you have good contact then it's one less thing to have to worry about.