Some customers of UK broadband ISP Zen Internet have complained about repeated service disconnections after their bundled FRITZ!box 7530 routers from AVM received a firmware update to the latest FRITZ!OS v8 software, which appears to have introduced an unexpected instability into the device.
In fairness, new firmware updates for any device can sometimes result in a tiny number of people experiencing unexpected bugs, although such things are normally extremely rare. But in this case, something about Zen’s update process or the update itself appeared to cause Zen’s FRITZ!box 7530 routers to reboot themselves for some customers with a fair bit of regularity, which in turn disrupted related broadband connections.
Curiously, we haven’t been able to identify any issues – at least not to a similar scale – on other providers that have gone through the same process with the same router, such as those in Germany, which already received the same update. This suggests that the cause may be something more specific to Zen.
ISPreview has received several emails about this problem over the past week, as well as spotting a few related reports on social media (example) and a long TBB thread covering the same fault that began on 14th October 2024 (here). But Zen has not made any obvious mention of the problem on either of their service status pages (here and here).
The good news is that Zen appears to have rectified the problem today, which should hopefully return some connection stability to those impacted by it.
Dean Burdon, Zen’s Customer Experience Director, said:
“We are aware of an issue affecting a small number of our customers using the Fritz!Box 7530 router following the recent OS8 firmware update from AVM. This issue has impacted less than 0.5% of the routers we have in circulation. Nonetheless, customer satisfaction is our top priority, and we are committed to ensuring that all our customers have a seamless experience.
The recent firmware update triggered an automatic reboot of the device, which may have appeared as a disconnection to some users. We have identified and stopped this auto reboot and are closely monitoring any further reported faults. We urge any customers experiencing issues to contact our support team for assistance.”
UPDATE 22nd Oct 2024 @ 7:22am
Despite Zen claiming to have “identified and stopped this auto reboot” cycle, we’re still seeing reports of the problem occurring after that statement was made. Clearly there’s a bit more work to be done.