BLU Products Bricks Phones with Update, Give Zero Information - The UpStream

The long-lasting image of a company is not built upon how they handle themselves when things are going well, but instead is built upon how they handle a crisis. For example, a year from now, people will only have one image of Equifax: the recipient of a preventable data breach. The image of Yahoo was so damaged by the revelation of several breaches that Verizon almost canceled their planned purchase of the company.

This week, a new company has been added to the list of massive failures during a crisis: BLU Products. The Miami, Florida based company designs and builds low cost Android phones, and previously built Windows Phones as well. A firmware update released this week to their Life One X2 handset had an unexpected side effect: complete handset failure. Customers have been posting complaints on the company's Facebook page, as well as their BLU SubReddit.

Unfortunately, the company has not done anything to deal with the problem. Instead, there is a canned response that BLU support has been using in reply to every comment, on every Facebook post regarding the issue. It reads,

Hi **person's name**, we are aware of the issue with the Life One X2, and currently working on it. We apologize for the inconvenience.

This is as close to a public statement as we have received from BLU. The latest post under their News section on their website is from Halloween, announcing their first Sprint phone. On Facebook, there has been no statement aside from the canned response, but there have been a number of new posts since the incident began. Several posts about the soccer team they sponsor, a few advertisements about their rewards program, and one general advertisement for BLU phones in general.

What's worse than the company's complete lack of a public response has been their private response. Apparently, the company has absolutely no contingency plan in place for a flawed firmware release. In the case of companies like Microsoft or Samsung, if a firmware update goes sideways, there is a process in place to revive the phone without losing data, or at least retrieve data before resetting the phone. With BLU, there is nothing; if you trusted your data to the company's phone and you received the flawed firmware update, your data is gone. To get the phone working again, your only choice is to do a full reset.

This is one of the sacrifices you make when you decide to go with a low-cost provider for any product or service. No one goes to Wal-Mart expecting good customer service; they go for the price. The same is true here - the choice was made for price, not because the company is a powerhouse.