Samsung's disastrous firmware update bricks refrigerators ahead of South Korean holiday

A “routine” update for a Samsung smart fridge model in South Korea has broken the refrigerators for thousands of users, with the incident happening ahead of a major holiday. According to Seoul Shinmun [machine translated], the company pushed an erroneous update to some customers during testing, which resulted in the refrigerators getting stuck while updating.

Unfortunately, several customers only found out about the issue hours after the process had started (and, subsequently, gotten stuck). One customer said in a Samsung Members forum that when she arrived at 7 pm, she noticed that the fridge’s auto-open feature refused to work, the light inside it didn’t turn on, and the temperature inside the unit was starting to warm up. She even tried resetting the power to the fridge, to no avail. Another user lamented the same problem, noting that they'd owned the unit for less than a year, while others complained about food spoiling.

Even worse, this happened just a couple of days before a major South Korean holiday. Chuseok, also known as "Korean Thanksgiving," is a three-day mid-autumn harvest festival set from Sept. 24 - 26. The holiday, which lands partially on a weekend, meant that service was going to be delayed. There were multiple reports that technicians couldn’t visit the affected customers until Oct. 1, with another user saying that they wouldn’t get serviced until Oct. 7.

This is a big problem as many families have stocked up on food for the celebration. One consumer said that this has ruined the holiday for customers who used these fridges, while others said, “All my Chuseok food is going to spoil,” “What am I supposed to do with the eel and premium beef?” and “I stocked up on food for the holiday, but it’s all melting.” One user claimed, “I threw away 20kg of spoiled food today — how am I supposed to spend the holiday now?”

Samsung soon recognized the gravity of the situation and promised that all affected customers would have their refrigerators restored by Sept. 24. The company also said that it would deploy emergency on-site services to attend to urgent issues such as refrigerator and freezer malfunctions. As for the spoiled food, Samsung said it is reviewing whether it will offer compensation.

Samsung said in 2023 that it plans to put AI chips in all its home appliances, which will supposedly make them smarter and run more efficiently. However, this incident raises the question of whether we really need these features. While it may offer marginal quality of life improvements for some users, the fact that a software update could break your AI fridge (or any other home appliance, for that matter) raises red flags for users. Faulty updates aside, there have also been privacy and security concerns — which we’ve previously seen on robot vacuums after one user accidentally gained control of over 6,700 units, and was also noticed on an LG washing machine that was allegedly sending almost 3.7GB of data daily.

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