An internet-connected coffee maker has become the unlikely centre of a debate about smart appliances after its owner discovered it had uploaded more than a terabyte of data in about ten days.

The device is a Keurig K-Supreme SMART, a pod machine that recognises pods and downloads brewing recipes from the cloud. Its owner, an IT professional who posts as Nomad and works for the 3D-printer manufacturer Prusa, noticed the traffic while reviewing statistics in Ubiquiti's UniFi network console for his parents' home. The screenshot shows 1,008.45 GB uploaded and 9.94 GB downloaded over ten days and nine hours — an average of roughly 9 Mbit/s upstream, enough to saturate an access point and threaten the rest of the network.

"Hey uh, Keurig – what the hell is a COFFEE MACHINE uploading," he wrote on X, in a post that quickly passed two million views. Replies blamed crypto mining, spying and torrent seeding. Nomad said he believes a firmware bug is the likeliest explanation: most of the traffic never left the local network, and the flood stopped after he rebooted the machine and isolated it on a separate VLAN. He has not been able to reproduce it, and suspects it requires sustained uptime to occur.

The episode is a tidy illustration of a familiar problem. Appliances now ship with Wi-Fi, companion apps, subscriptions and cloud services — and with firmware that users cannot inspect. Security researchers have long warned that cheap connected devices are rarely audited and can misbehave or be compromised. Cybernews says it has asked Keurig for comment; the manufacturer had not responded at the time of writing, and it is still unclear what the machine was sending.

For the family involved, the practical fix was simple: reboot, segment the network, and think twice about which appliances really need an internet connection. The deeper question — what a coffee maker believes it needs to upload a gigabyte a day — remains unanswered.

Sources