Owners mourn spoiled food after firmware update bricks Samsung smart fridges

Some Samsung smart fridges stopped working on Tuesday due to a firmware update.

Korean outlets were the first to report the problems, which affect Samsung’s Bespoke AI line of fridges. Star News Korea, per a Google-provided translation, said that most of the affected devices were four-door fridges from 2024 or later.

arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/owners-mourn-spoiled-food-after-firmware-update-bricks-samsung-smart-fridges/

Of all the appliances that could be “smart”, I find the fridge the least exciting.

My heat pump has Wi-Fi. Cool, I can turn it on remotely so it starts heating or cooling my home.

Washing machine that tells you it’s finished and reports the ETA in the meantime - not an entirely unwanted feature, since the same program could take 1 hour or 5 depending on how much laundry I put in. Mine doesn’t have it and I don’t NEED it, but if I’m ever in the market again and two equivalent washing machines from a reputable brand (MAYBE I’d trust Miele. Definitely not Samsung, LG, most others) were priced roughly the same, I’d buy the one with it.

I just can’t think of a world where a smart fridge would work better for me than my dumb one though. I paid a bit extra to get one that had a better efficiency rating and a nearly silent compressor and that’s it. The only things I would find to be “upgrades” over this would be if it was a larger SBS one that made ice, but I decided not to triple the budget from ~600 to ~2000.

How is your laundry taking 5 hours? Just how much are you stuffing in those machines?

A washer that takes that long would be kind of insane, but a drying time in the 4+ hour range isn’t that wild, in my experience.

And here the dumb washer/dryer at my place takes 45 mins to wash and 1 hr to dry, every time