Samsung Accidentally Ships Test Update to Smart Fridges in Korea; Fridges Now Frozen Everywhere Except the Inside
The screens stopped, the lights stopped, the doors stopped opening themselves, and the cold, at great cost, stopped too.
SEOUL — Samsung Electronics on Tuesday confirmed that an unfinished software update intended for internal testing was distributed to smart refrigerators belonging to real customers in South Korea, causing the appliances to freeze in the software sense while ceasing entirely to freeze in the refrigerator sense.
"We deeply regret that a build intended for a lab fridge reached a family fridge," said a company spokesperson. "The update was a test. The refrigerator passed it. The food did not."
The incident occurred over the Chuseok holiday, when many households had stocked their refrigerators with an estimated three days of holiday food, and when, according to a Samsung engineer familiar with the rollout, the release pipeline was being supervised by "a dashboard and a hope."
Affected owners reported that the internal lights, the touchscreen and the motorized door-opening feature all stopped working at once. Several said the most unsettling part was not the warm kimchi but the silence.
"For three years it greeted me every morning and told me the weather," said Han Ji-sook, 44, of Suwon. "Now it just stands there. It is the first time I have ever had to open my own refrigerator. I did not know it was so heavy."
Technicians dispatched to repair the units replaced their motherboards, a procedure that one service worker estimated takes 40 minutes, about 38 minutes longer than it takes to replace a refrigerator's light bulb, which the new models do not have.
The company said it had halted the rollout and would add an additional review step before pushing software to kitchen appliances. Industry analysts said it was the first known case of a continuous-deployment incident with a measurable smell.
At press time, Samsung had pushed a follow-up update to affected fridges, which displayed a single line of text reading, "Please contact a service center," and a recipe for soup.