Earlier this week hundreds of owners of a smart lock found themselves in the unusual position of being either locked in (or out) of their homes.
The LockState customers had not been hacked by criminals, or suffered a major hardware failure.
Instead the locks had been bricked by the company that sold them, LockState and it was all thanks to a bad piece of software.
Now while many internet-connected devices can recover from a faulty update (as anyone who has reset their iPhone can attest), a smart lock sadly doesn’t have that luxury.
As such LockState sent out a message to all of its affected customers with the rather unfortunate news that they would either have to send the locks back for repair or replacement.
Considering the main plus of their system is that it can be updated over-the-air, this is an unfortunate blip for the world of the Internet of Things.
According to Kaspersky Lab’s own blog Threat Post, the company had accidentally sent out a software update to its 6000i locks that was actually meant for its 7000i series.
By sending them to the wrong model the 6000i locks malfunctioned and were disconnected from LockState’s servers making it impossible to repair them wirelessly.
To make matters worse for LockState, over 200 of the locks belonged to Airbnb owners, many of whom had bought the locks as part of a partnership between the home-hosting company and LockState.
Of course accidents do happen, and while there’s no doubt that internet-connected security systems are almost certainly the future, it shouldn’t be a total surprise that like all new technologies there are bound to be some teething problems along the way.