This past Monday, August 15, Bambu Lab cloud services experienced two outages that appear to have caused affected users’ 3D printers to later begin printing unprompted – with many users reporting damage to their 3D printers.
Between 10:03–11:10 and 12:11–12:23 UTC, users were unable to start prints from Bambu Studio, the company’s slicing software. Bambu Lab has since released a statement detailing the outage and subsequent behavior and its early suspicions of the cause.
All3DP reviewers also experienced the cloud error while testing the OEM’s new P1S 3D printer, but did not experience a job starting without intervention as the printer was switched off at the power supply. The error does not appear to have been limited to a particular Bambu Lab model.
“Jobs were sent to printers, but our system failed to receive confirmation of receipt. This led to repeat attempts to send the job,” Bambu Lab says, describing a phenomenon it has dubbed ‘job jamming’. “The result was that the print job was successfully completed on the printer, but our cloud service believed it had not been done. When service resumed, the once-jammed job was resent, leading to the unexpected printing of an already finished job.”
During the outage, All3DP’s experience was that Bambu Studio would send jobs, and the P1S would show them download. When complete, prints failed to begin on the device, but Bambu Studio showed a job underway until the 3D printer was turned off.
Some users have commented that it seems odd the printers’ variety of failsafe measures didn’t stop unordered print jobs. “At the very least auto bed leveling should have caught it,” said Reddit user TheAdvocate. “Also collision detection way before damage.”
Criticism leveled at Bambu Lab 3D printers often points precisely to cloud connectivity – this incident seems to be a prime example of what can go wrong.
In Bambu Lab’s response, it takes “full responsibility” for the error, promising to find and correct the root cause, and asks users who suffered damage from the incident to contact its support team “to assist and make things right.” It also commits to “further developing LAN Mode”; given the company’s admission that the problem was on the backend (“Jobs were sent to printers, but our system failed to receive confirmation of receipt,” it says) perhaps it should take this opportunity to disentangle local jobs from its cloud services. If you’d like to take steps to do that yourself, check out some existing guides to enable LAN Mode.
Update: Bambu Lab shared an update on Friday thoroughly detailing the error and the steps it’s taking to prevent a similar event in the future. Additional failsafes are coming to all the OEM’s systems in future updates including part detection via lidar (X1 series) or a manually-cleared prompt (P1 series), among other updates to increase monitoring during prints and improve cloud printing logic by checking timestamps and discarding older files. Maybe most interesting are the promised improvements to LAN mode that Bambu Lab says will include file management, media download, and user certificate authentication for shared networks. The company has also improved its online resources regarding LAN mode, publishing an (overdue) guide to enable it and bind local printers with Bambu Studio.
If you suffered printer damage as a result of last week’s outage, Bambu Lab has also detailed the support you can expect: spare parts to replace any damage and spools of filament to compensate for wasted material – plus an additional two free spools of Bambu Lab PLA.
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License: The text of "Bambu Lab Cloud Error Causes Prints to Start Unprompted, Users’ Printers Damaged" by All3DP is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.