A refrigerator that connects to the internet is supposed to get smarter with each update. For a group of Samsung owners this week, the update made their machines stop working altogether.
The update arrived the way such things are supposed to: quietly, over the air, through Samsung’s SmartThings app. What happened next was not supposed to happen at all. A firmware update pushed on Sept. 22 disabled a number of Samsung’s Bespoke AI four-door refrigerators, owners and South Korean media reported. The machines lost power and stopped cooling, their screens froze on a message reading “Checking SmartThings app during update,” and the app showed the appliances as offline. Some owners said the refrigerators had been working normally moments before.
The failures were concentrated in South Korea and hit the Bespoke AI four-door line, most of them models from 2024 or later. Korean outlets reported hundreds of complaints, and the timing could hardly have been worse. The outage ran into Chuseok, the autumn harvest holiday that began Thursday and is one of the country’s biggest family gatherings.
Chuseok is a holiday built around food. Families prepare large meals, stores close, and a refrigerator full of holiday ingredients is the difference between a celebration and a scramble. To lose that refrigeration two days before the holiday began, with no technician available, turned a technical failure into something more personal. “The customers who bought Samsung refrigerators have had their holidays completely ruined, while those Samsung employees are just having a good time at home,” one forum member wrote.
The human cost showed up on Samsung’s own community forum. One owner wrote that the refrigeration functions “did not work normally, so all the food in the refrigerator had to be disposed of.” Another complained that customers trusted Samsung with an official update and were left unable to cool food before the holiday. “So absurd and embarrassing,” the user wrote.
Samsung’s response unfolded over the following days. The company stopped distributing the update as of Sept. 23 and said it was working to repair affected units, aiming to fix some by Sept. 24. A representative posted on the company forum that an error occurred during the testing process for a software update and that abnormal symptoms had appeared in some customers’ devices. Samsung has apologized and said it will dispatch technicians.
The most striking detail is what appears to have gone wrong. Several outlets reported that internal test software reached customers by mistake, a version of the firmware never meant for public release. That is the kind of failure that is supposed to be caught by exactly the checks a connected appliance exists to run, and it is the kind of error that erodes the trust on which the whole smart-home business depends.
Samsung did not say how many units were affected or whether the problem extended beyond Korea. Support agents told some owners that technicians were in short supply and that a repair might not be available until October, deepening the frustration for households in the middle of a holiday.
The incident cuts to a tension that has run through the appliance industry for a decade. A refrigerator that was once a dumb box of metal and freon is now a computer with a network connection, and the features that justify its price, cameras inside, grocery tracking, remote diagnostics, come with a new failure mode: a bad update can turn the entire machine into a wall ornament.
The episode also fits a pattern the industry would prefer to leave behind. Connected devices from a range of manufacturers have been rendered useless by flawed updates over the years, and Samsung itself has recent experience with appliance safety problems. The company recalled more than a million slide-in electric ranges in 2024 over a fire hazard. Each incident reinforces a lesson consumers have learned the hard way: the most expensive appliance in the kitchen is also the one most exposed to a bug.
Analysts said the economics of the smart home make failures like this particularly costly. A connected appliance is sold at a premium and expected to last a decade or more, but its software is updated on the same schedule as a phone’s. When an update goes wrong, the manufacturer owns the repair in a way it never did for a broken compressor.
The Bespoke AI line sits at the center of Samsung’s appliance strategy, marketed as the flagship of a kitchen built around a family-hub display and AI features. That a routine update could disable it, and that the fix might take days, is precisely the outcome the marketing was designed to promise would never happen.
Samsung has not said how it will compensate owners for spoiled food or for days without refrigeration during a national holiday. The company’s apology, and its promise to send technicians, is a first step. The harder question is whether customers who paid a premium for a smart refrigerator will trust it with the next update. For the households watching their food spoil this week, the answer may not be the one Samsung hoped they would reach.
