A firmware update pushed through Samsung's SmartThings platform bricked some of the company's smart refrigerators this week, leaving owners throwing out food just as Korea's Chuseok harvest holiday began.
Korean outlets reported the problem first. Star News Korea said most affected units were four-door Bespoke AI fridges from 2024 or later, and that they 'suddenly lost power and stopped functioning immediately after' attempting the update; the SmartThings app then showed them as offline. Some owners reported the internal display frozen on the message 'Checking SmartThings app during update'. One user wrote that because cooling itself had failed, all the food in the fridge had to be disposed of. SBS Korea reported hundreds of complaints filed.
Samsung paused the update on September 23 and aimed to fix some fridges the following day, according to ZDNET Korea. In a forum post, a company representative said an error occurred during testing of the software update and that emergency measures were being taken through Samsung service centres as a top priority. Some users said support initially told them technicians were scarce and repairs might not come until October.
Samsung did not answer Ars Technica's questions about how many units were affected, in which countries, or what it will change to prevent a repeat.
The episode is a small, uncomfortable illustration of a wider pattern: internet-connected appliances take on the failure modes of software — remote updates, remote outages, remote mistakes — without inheriting the recoverability. A dumb fridge can break too, but usually not because of a change nobody physically made to it. And as owners on Samsung's own forum concluded, the fridge is not the worst place for that risk to land: a device that suddenly stops cooling can also ruin medication.
