Nest pulls Nest Protect smoke detector from sale, remotely disables ‘wave’ feature due to safety hazard

Nest—which was recently acquired by Google—pulled its Nest Protect smoke and carbon monoxide detector from sale today and issued a letter from Tony Fadell, the company’s CEO about a serious potential safety issue that arose in testing. Nest is advising existing owners that a feature on the device that allows users to disable the detector with the wave of a hand will be automatically disabled.

During recent laboratory testing of the Nest Protect smoke alarm, we observed a unique combination of circumstances that caused us to question whether the Nest Wave (a feature that enables you to turn off your alarm with a wave of the hand) could be unintentionally activated. This could delay an alarm going off if there was a real fire.

The company is currently working on a resolution for the issue and will put the Nest Protect back on sale once it has been fixed.

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. 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.

Nest will also be working in conjunction with safety officials in multiple countries to determine when the device is safe for sale again. Fadell says this process could take up to three months to finish, meaning the device will be unavailable for quite some time.