Imagine if your thermostat suddenly decides to die on you in the peak periods of winter - the thought gives you the chills right? This is exactly what happened to users of the Nest Learning Thermostat.
A software glitch in the thermostat drained out the battery, deactivating the device for many Nest users. The bug that caused the problem is believed to have come with the software update Nest pushed out for the thermostat in December 2015.
The issue was spotted by The New York Times writer Nick Bilton when he became a victim of the problem and woke up to a cold house.
"The Nest Learning Thermostat is dead to me, literally. Last week, my once-beloved 'smart' thermostat suffered from a mysterious software bug that drained its battery and sent our home into a chill in the middle of the night," wrote Bilton.
Nest's co-founder Matt Rogers confirmed to the publication that the bug was indeed responsible.
Bilton was not the only one who experienced problems with the smart thermostat from Nest. Several other users of the Nest Learning Thermostat also encountered issues and took to the company's community forum to express their angst.
"Woke this morning to a dark Nest. Had to plug it into the computer long enough so I could use it manually. The battery was completely drained," said an aggrieved customer. "We had a Nest [A]ndroid update, too, so I suspect there was a software update that happened that drained the batteries dry."
"[W]oke up to a dead [N]est and a very cold house. Not good when you have a baby sleeping!" ranted another user.
"The battery meter keeps hovering at 3.5v. I've just plugged it directly into a USB cable but I have no way of seeing the voltage. I thought I was going to have to buy a new thermostat or replace the battery, but it looks like they pushed out a bad update," said a user.
Users of the Nest thermostat also took to Twitter to voice their displeasure and seek out solutions.
@bbolan1 @nest Mine is offline. Not enough battery (?) I'm traveling. Called nest. Known problem. No resolution. #nest #fail
— Tim Shea (@timothy_shea) January 6, 2016
@nest what's going on with the server? My gen2 thermostat has been offline and low battery since this morning. — CTrinh (@CTrinhTweet) January 8, 2016
Nest tried to placate users by acknowledging the issue and said it was looking into the problem.
"We're aware that some of our customers have been reporting issues with their Nest's battery getting low. We're currently looking into the issue, and we'll let you know when we have more information," acknowledged Nest.
It offered a temporary solution to the problem by asking users to follow the instructions on its help page.
On Jan. 11, Nest announced that it has fixed the issue.
@jkyleb Hi, Kyle. Apologies for the brief outage. We're back up and running, please reach out if you're still offline and need assistance. — Nest (@nest) January 11, 2016
With connected devices encountering issues such as the Nest thermostat glitch, people would be skeptical of having such devices as they render a user helpless, which does not augur well for IoT.
Imagine if the smoke alarm or security camera went offline due to software glitches!
