Nest CEO Tony Fadell released a letter announcing that due to a discovered flaw in a feature that allows consumers to wave their hands to turn off the alarm. This "Nest Wave' feature could be turned on unintentionally which would compromise the device's effectivity.
"We feel that the best and safest thing to do is to immediately disable the Nest Wave feature to resolve the issue and remove any safety concerns.," Fadell notes. "While we fix Nest Wave, we have also halted sales of all new Nest Protect alarms to ensure no one buys an alarm that needs an immediate update." To this end, sales of Nest Protect smoke alarms have been halted until a solution is found.
"Once we have a solution that ensures Nest Wave works as intended, we will update our software to turn this feature back on. This will only happen after extensive testing and once we have received approval from safety agencies in the US, Canada and UK. We expect this to take at least two or three months and we’ll continue to update you as we have more information."