Multiple owners of Bambu Lab's X1C or P1P 3D printers reported that their machines suddenly started the print jobs in the middle of the night without any user input.
Some owners reported that they woke to failed prints, while others complained that their device printed the second copy of the previous job, and in a few unfortunate cases, the machines sustained damage while trying to print two copies of an object.
Bambu Lab released an official statement acknowledging the issue. The company said the incident is still being investigated but it suspects it was caused by a cloud outage.
“The initial conclusion—or rather, assumption—is that the incident was caused by a phenomenon we're calling "Job jamming." When the cloud outage occurred, our service became unstable. Jobs were sent to printers, but our system failed to receive confirmation of receipt. This led to repeat attempts to send the job, including some manual resends by confused users, which have been confirmed in a few well-documented instances. Automatic retry by the cloud service may also have contributed, though this is still under investigation. The result was that the print job was successfully completed on the printer, but our cloud service believed it had not been done. When service resumed, the once-jammed job was resent, leading to the unexpected printing of an already finished job,” the company explained.
One of the major concerns here, as The Verge points out, is that “3D printers are one of the few remote-controlled devices in a house that can get hot enough to start a fire, and now, we’re learning that remote control system wasn’t fully thought through.”
For its part, Bambu Lab said it accepts full responsibility for the incident and plans to implement measures like additional verifications before a print is started, to prevent such situations happening in the future.
“We are committed to further developing LAN Mode for our printers, which is a way that customers can use to send prints remotely to the printer if such Cloud Outage occurs. Besides LAN Mode, SD card printing is also available as an offline method of printing,” the company added.
