On the night of Sunday 11 October, hundreds of supermarkets in France had their fridges told to overheat. Intermarché and Netto said at least 300 of their shops were hit, Coopérative U more than 100, Carrefour 80, and other chains were caught as well. The cooling units were pushed through a defrost cycle that drove temperatures as high as 50 degrees Celsius. Food had to be thrown away, and the Paris prosecutor's office said it caused fires. As far as I can see, nobody has claimed responsibility.
I have not been able to stop thinking about it, and not only because of the fridges.
What Bothers Me
A few weeks ago I wrote about the people building AI warning that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. Jacob Coxon resigned and said it publicly. That debate is loud, and it should be. But it is a debate about the future, about machines that do not exist yet. This one is not about the future. Real shops lost real food and some of them caught fire, and it was done through ordinary connected equipment that most people never think of as a computer.
In my feeds it was gone within days. The next model launch pushed it out. I am not saying nobody reported it, they did. I am saying it did not become the conversation, and I think it should have.
The Same Power, Pointed Somewhere Else
We have just seen one person rebuild seven Adobe apps with AI in about a week. I was impressed, and I meant it. But power like that does not only point at things people want. Nobody has said AI was used in this attack, and I am not claiming it was. What I am saying is that the speed that lets one person build a Photoshop clone is available to anyone looking for a weakness in something that was never updated. When finding the door takes a week instead of a year, the old box on the wall matters a lot more.
The Warnings Were There
Danfoss, the maker of the controllers, said the affected units were running outdated firmware and that it had long told customers to update or replace older equipment. French reporting said many of them are old generation units that no longer get security updates. A security firm called Claroty had published research in August about weaknesses in Danfoss systems. Investigators have not said how the attackers got in, so I am not claiming that was the route. I am saying the warnings existed, and it still took fires in shops before the conversation started.
Why I Think This Should Be Urgent
This time it was fridges. One analyst told Al Jazeera the scale was rare but not unprecedented, and warned that energy or hospitals could be next. I think that is the right worry. Every country has the same old boxes in the same back rooms, connected, forgotten, no longer updated, and everyone assumes someone else is responsible for them.
So if I were deciding the order of worry, I would put this near the top. Not instead of the AI safety debate, next to it, and with more urgency, because this part is already happening. Count what is connected. Find out what is no longer updated. Replace it or take it offline. And decide who answers for it before the next bad night, not after.
The loud debate is about a machine that might one day be too powerful. The quiet one is about a fridge controller that nobody updated. I do not know which one hurts us first. I know which one already did.