Imagine waking up in the middle night to your 3D printer printing. You’re sure you didn’t ask for a print. Your previous project is still sitting on the printer. This sounds like some sort of eerie technology haunting, or that the machines have become self-aware. The problem is caused by a cloud outage, which may be less scary but just as frightening.
The Verge reported on August 15 that many owners of Bambu Lab 3D Printers had reported their devices started printing without consent. The printing was not affected by the fact that nozzles were bent or damaged or if another component was printed over top of a previous project. The printers that cost from $599 up to $1,449 were printing at an ungodly hour, such as 4 am.
“Started a printing at 11 PM. The time-lapse video shows that it finished successfully just before 2AM. While I slept at around 2:30 AM, the machine began again with the print on the bed. “I see a timestamped time-lapse that begins at around 2:30AM,” complained a Reddit member going by the name u/beehphy on the r/BambuLab section.
The user went on to say, “filament poured out of the side, coiled all over the chamber and only stopped feeding after the temperature sensor had been removed.”
The company wrote a blog post on August 16 saying that they would look into this problem. They announced the failure of cloud printing in their system status page.
Bambu explained the “cloud outage”, more, on August 18, by saying:
The MQTTSDK used for the cloud connection was the cause of the problem. The timeout resulted in the disconnect of one of two MQTTSDK clients. In most cases, the service automatically restores the connection. However, in this case the service reported a successful report of a connection when in fact the connection had not been reestablished. During that time, there were several print-start messages.
A second connection error was detected. This time the service was able to reconnect. As a result, the system sent accumulated print messages to printers. If the printer was idle, it would start printing.
A “large number” of API requests were made simultaneously, which prevented a timely reply. The Bambu Studio software of the printers uses a logic which “reinitiates”[s] “A print request is sent immediately after you access the cloud.”
