A Bristol man has been stuck in his bathroom for six hours after a Virgin Media outage rendered every internet-connected device in his home inoperable, including the electronic lock on the bathroom door.
Tom Hartley, 34, entered the bathroom at 7.22am on Tuesday morning. His router died at 7.29am. He has been there ever since.
The door lock, manufactured by SecureHome Solutions, requires authentication via a smartphone app to open from either side. The app requires an internet connection. Mr Hartley’s internet is not connected. The door, consequently, remains locked.
“I thought I was being clever,” said Mr Hartley through the door, speaking to his neighbour who had been summoned via desperate tapping on the pipes. “Every light switch, every plug socket, every bloody door handle. All connected. All optimised. All utterly useless without three bars of Wi-Fi.”
The bathroom mirror, a £600 smart display unit, is frozen on a buffering symbol. It has been buffering for five hours. The toilet, which flushes via voice command or app control, will not respond to increasingly frantic manual override attempts. Mr Hartley reports that the emergency flush lever “does absolutely nothing, possibly because it’s decorative.”
His Alexa-enabled towel warmer has continued to function, but only to inform him at thirty-minute intervals that it is “currently unable to process your request.” He has not made any requests for over four hours.
“The shower turned itself off mid-rinse because it couldn’t verify my user profile,” Mr Hartley added. “I’ve got shampoo in my hair. I’m wearing one sock. The other sock is in the bedroom, which is on the far side of two more smart locks.”
Jennifer Okafor, a consumer technology analyst at Pembridge Research Group, said the incident highlighted growing concerns about cloud dependency. “We’re seeing a lot of devices that have perfectly functional physical components but simply refuse to operate without checking in with a server in California. It’s magnificent, really, in its stupidity.”
Virgin Media restored service to the area at 1.47pm. Mr Hartley’s door unlocked immediately, though not before his smart lighting system had begun its pre-programmed “evening relaxation sequence” at maximum brightness.
He has since ordered a traditional lock from Screwfix. It cost £8.50.
A SecureHome Solutions spokesperson said the bathroom lock had “performed exactly as designed” and that customers should “ensure robust backup connectivity solutions, such as a secondary broadband provider or 4G failover system” before installing the £340 device on rooms they might need to leave.
Mr Hartley’s smart kettle, which he had switched on before entering the bathroom, boiled at 2.03pm. The house was empty. It reboiled every thirty minutes until he returned home and discovered it had automatically ordered replacement descaling tablets through Amazon Dash integration.