Here's the good news: Your Quirky Wink smart home hub is more secure than it's ever been before. So much so, that it can't even connect to the very servers it needs to function: That's how locked-down the device is. Oh, and now you can't control any connected devices anymore.
Unfortunately, if you're proud owner of a Quirky Wink smart home hub, Quirky's unintentional treatment has now left you a bit stranded. And, even worse, there's nothing you can do to fix your smart home hub after-the-fact—Wink can't access your device from afar to fix it, nor can you update it with any kind of patch yourself that allows you to regain access to Quirky's servers.
"To cut to the chase: We need your Wink Hub back. We'll update it and get it back to you within a few days," reads an email sent by Quirky this morning.
"We're terribly embarrassed by this whole situation. This outage was completely preventable and caused by a security measure that was put in place to protect you and your family. Unfortunately we failed to make an update to a security measure that was expiring, and therefore locked down your Hub's access to the server," the company adds.
Whoops.
Quirky will be suspending sales of the Wink smart home hub until it can fix them all up again, which it expects to be able to do—and resume sales—this week. If you're one of the unlucky ones affected by the issue, Quirky will send you a prepaid shipping label and a box you can use to send the device back to the company. It's free for you, it's just inconvenient if you rely on your Wink hub for a ton of things at your house.
"We are incredibly sorry for the inconvenience caused here. As an apology, we'd like to extend a $50 gift card to Wink.com (Valid only for the next 48 hours on wink.com to make purchases, not redeemable for cash)," reads Quirky's email.
Admittedly, it would be a bit nicer if Quirky gave users who take part in the ship-back, fix-it deal a $50 credit that they could use at any point, not just across the next two days.
Nevertheless, it's a pretty decent discount if you've been looking for new things to pair to your Wink hub—once you get it back, that is.