A Smart Coffee Maker Pushed 1 Terabyte of Data in 10 Days
Set Trending Topics as a preferred source on Google.
It was supposed to make coffee, and instead it choked the Wi-Fi: A connected Keurig coffee maker sent about one terabyte of data through a home network in ten days. The discovery came from an IT specialist who goes by Nomad, works for the Czech 3D printer maker Prusa and manages his parents’ network remotely. He posted his find on X, along with a screenshot from his network software and a note that he was unplugging the machine immediately and buying his parents a new one.
97 Gigabytes a Day
The problem surfaced when his parents complained about slow internet. According to Tom’s Hardware, the Keurig K-Supreme SMART uploaded about 1,008 gigabytes and downloaded almost 10 gigabytes over ten days and nine hours. That works out to about 97 gigabytes a day, or a constant 9 megabits per second, enough to saturate a Wi-Fi access point on its own. For comparison, an LG washing machine that made headlines for its data appetite in 2024 used 3.6 gigabytes a day.
What the machine was actually sending remains unclear. Normally it transmits only small bits of information such as its power state, its brewing status and which pod was inserted. Nomad suspects a software bug and says most of the traffic probably never left the home network. He did not capture the data in detail. Rebooting the machine and moving it to an isolated subnetwork stopped the problem, at least for now, but the coffee maker is being replaced anyway. Keurig has not commented publicly.
Nosy Home Appliances
The case is part of a long list. According to a 2022 report by The Boston Globe, Keurig shared brewing data with brands that make pods. Consumer Reports found a clothes dryer that sent its manufacturer the equivalent of 135,000 text messages a week. And in a TechRadar test, the app for a Lavazza coffee machine asked for access to contacts and call logs.
Still, the connected home keeps growing: Apple, for instance, is having LG build doorbells, locks and cameras for it. Experts therefore advise putting smart devices on a separate network, so that a faulty or hacked device cannot reach laptops or phones. And before buying, it is worth asking whether a coffee maker needs to be online at all. Nomad, meanwhile, has a different problem: He is now best known for a rogue coffee machine, he wrote.
