Katarzyna Petru
On 1 August, Samsung Smart TV owners around the world woke up to a reality where almost all applications had stopped working. Access to YouTube, Disney+, HBO Max and dozens of other platforms had vanished. This wasn't a typical outage of a single service, but a total blackout of applications on Samsung TVs – and it happened right in the middle of the holiday season, when many viewers were particularly reaching for streaming services. Only Netflix remained accessible, which immediately caught the attention of users and experts.
Avalanche of reports and unclear errors
Those who tried to launch the app found themselves staring at error codes related to the server, internet, or security certificates instead of enjoying a series or film. Normally, this would suggest a user-side issue, but this time, the fault lay with Samsung's servers. The online community was abuzz: over 800 posts detailing the outage appeared on Reddit, and on Samsung's official forum, as many as 85 thousand users desperately sought explanations and solutions.
Tizen and the "thin client" – Samsung's Achilles heel
The outage revealed just how dependent Samsung Smart TV apps are on the Tizen platform and the company's central servers. In practice, this means that if Samsung were to shut down its servers in the future, a large portion of the apps could completely stop functioning. Only Netflix continued to operate without interruption, likely due to its reliance on its own independent CDN infrastructure. Experts also recalled the "thin client" model, where the interface is loaded from the server, in contrast to solutions like tvOS on Apple TV, which operate locally on the device.
Samsung's Reaction and Bitter Déjà Vu
The company assured in a conversation with Android Authority that "the TV service was affected for a short time overnight, but it has already been restored," and users can resolve the issue by turning the TV off and on again with the remote. However, not everyone shared this optimism – some reported that after the reset, they could not download any apps because the TV could not read the terms of service, and the setup still wasn't working properly. Worse still, this is not the first such crisis – in 2020, Samsung's Blu-ray players were "bricked" due to a faulty internet configuration and required physical repairs. Today's failure showed that history can repeat itself, and the entire platform is built on more fragile foundations than many might have assumed.
Source: The Verge, Android Authority
