Samsung bricks UK TVs with botched firmware update

Alan Martin August 25, 2017

“If we can just get through the Galaxy Note 8 launch without any slip-ups,” you an imagine Samsung’s executives thinking, “we might just be able to put the Note 7 debacle behind us.” The Note 8 announcement did indeed go very smoothly, but it looks like someone took their eye off the ball in the TV department. A firmware update sent out to high-end 4K British and European TVs on 8 August has bricked TVs so severely that it looks like users will need to send them back to Samsung for repair.

Samsung bricks UK TVs with botched firmware update

“We’ve had it confirmed that the solution that our TV guys have been testing works,” wrote a Samsung moderator yesterday on the official forums. “It would need to be installed by an approved Samsung engineer, so please contact our TV Support teams so they can arrange a suitable appointment for you.”

This, as you can imagine, has not entirely satisfied customers, following radio silence from the South Korean giants. “They have broken my TV, left me without news for a week, lied to me about call backs, wasted huge amount of my time in calls and on hold and generally lied to me,” wrote the appropriately named SamsungTVUser.

“Now they tell me I can have an engineer sometime in the next week or so (if I stay in all day) but they won’t be giving any compensation. Utterly abysmal.” samsung_brick_uk_tvs_with_botched_firmware_update_requiring_an_engineer_fix_2

Following the update on 8 August, sets that were working fine literally hours earlier would either not turn on at all, or be stuck to a single channel, without working remotes or changeable volume. For everyone’s sakes, you’ve got to hope they didn’t leave the channel on Magic TV before applying the update: these people have suffered enough.

“We spent nearly £1,400 on this TV two weeks ago,” one angry customer told The Guardian. It’s holiday period in the UK and we thought kids would enjoy watching [a] new TV. To my horror, it stopped working from day two. What’s even more frustrating is the customer service: all I get is ‘we are aware of the issue and will get back’. Six days on and counting.”

Curiously, the problem only seems to affect European sets, with no corresponding issue with matching American models. TVs affected seem to include the 2017 MU6, MU7 and MU8 ranges, while older generations seem unaffected.

Image: Maurizio Pesce and DennisM used under Creative Commons