Tell HN: Nest Software Update Failed and Now We're Freezing

Update: Just got through to tech, they are working late. Apparently our issue is an edge case but there are a bunch of problems with their OS update and automatic rollback. Here's the temporary fix: to reboot a Nest, press it for 10 or 15 seconds. Then, when the Nest is booting up, go into Settings and disconnect the Nest from the Internet so it doesn't try to software update endlessly. That has worked and we thankfully have heat again. I generally like my Nest and have found their support to be excellent, so I'm pretty patient, but it is definitely exasperating to hold a crying baby while calling tech support in the middle of the night because of a failed software update on my thermostat!

This makes me wonder if any startups have been responsible yet for the death or injury of people who use their software.

Personally I think it's only a matter of time.

Did you keep your old thermostat? The wires aren't too complicated to hook back up.

How come there is no way to manually override Nest and turn on the heatpump? Seems like a fairly obviously dumb design decisions from Nest. I wonder if this is way for them to "lock" in customers for to speak.

It would be cool for things like this to ship with a dumb backup that can be easily replace if/when catastrophic failure occurs

Having had this happen with at least two plain ol' thermostats, my fix for those was to go down to Lowes, pick up a $10 thermostat until I'd gotten my more expensive models repaired.

I'm not personally familiar with the Nest, but is there some change to the architecture that precludes you from doing that as a stopgap?