Samsung Blu-ray players are rebooting in a loop and nobody knows why
Thousands of users across the internet are reporting severe issues with their Samsung Blu-ray players, home theater, and home cinema systems.
All issues appear to have started at the same time Friday, June 19, when the first reports began popping up on Samsung's official support forums [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], Reddit, and Twitter.
Soooo Samsung apparently broke all their Blu-ray players at the same time?
— Xan (@ComicsByXan) June 19, 2020
wait, did _all_ the samsung blue-ray-players stopped working?
— Michael Sänger (@abductee_org) June 20, 2020
(because of course they do in 2020....)https://t.co/GM3lZLrl2I
Issues vary depending on the device model; however, the most encountered problems appears to be that Samsung Blu-ray players are entering a reboot loop as soon as they're turned on (see video below).
Other users reported other problems, such as the device making weird noises as it's constantly trying to read a disk even if the disk slot is empty.
In other cases, devices are shutting down seconds after being turned on, while other users are reporting that players are not responding to commands or button presses.
The root cause of the issue is currently unclear. ZDNet has reached out for comment to Samsung America and Samsung's main offices, but we have not heard back, most likely because of the weekend.
Some users have speculated that the issue could have been caused by a botched firmware update; however, this doesn't look to be true.
The issues impact a large number of device models, some of which are end-of-life. Furthermore, companies like Samsung don't usually push firmware updates to a large number of device models, all at once, on a late Friday afternoon.
A more realistic explanation is that the issues are being caused by an expired SSL certificate that the Samsung Blu-ray players were using to connect to Samsung servers via HTTPS.
Knowing nothing about the devices or the cause, this sounds a lot like an expired SSL certificate that was shipped in old firmware that nobody bothered to build an update for.https://t.co/FPdemTQHxZ
— Petru Ratiu (@rpetre) June 20, 2020
Expired certificates are often the cause of major outages, and they've hit other top companies before, such as Facebook, Microsoft, Roku, Ericsson, Mozilla, and others.