Voluntary Safety Recall of Fitbit Ionic Smartwatches

[FitbitCommunity]

Fitbit, in conjunction with the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), announced a voluntary recall of Fitbit Ionic smartwatches, which the company introduced in 2017 and stopped producing in 2020. The battery in the Ionic smartwatch can overheat, posing a burn hazard.

The health and safety of Fitbit users is our highest priority. We are taking this action out of an abundance of caution for our users. We will offer a refund to Fitbit Ionic customers.

This voluntary recall is specific to Fitbit Ionic devices. It does not impact any other Fitbit smartwatches or trackers.

If you have an impacted Fitbit Ionic device, please stop using it and visit our webpage where you’ll find:

• Answers to common questions
• Information on how to receive a refund 
• Access to a special discount on select Fitbit devices, bands, and services, if available in your region, for a limited time.

[Geeeoooorrrgge]

@Odyssey13 - Every other forum I’ve been on generates this automatically. If you click ‘reply’ on someone’s post, it auto tags the person you’re replying to, or generates a quotation box of that persons post. 

I’ve never seen a forum that expects someone to tag, after they’ve already pressed Reply.

[Michele711]

I sent my watch back a couple of months ago due to the recall and was told a refund will follow its interesting that I haven’t heard anything from the company. 

[FitbitUser1511]

I would like SOMEONE from Fitbit to explain what is going on with the refunds since most of us sent it in (US) or had it deactivated (rest of world) over 2 months ago.  

can we just get some reasonable explanation?

[Perring1982]

Sadly you’re unlikely to get it. Most of the interaction you’ll get is from all off us stuck in the same situation as yourself. It’s incredibly frustrating.

[SunsetRunner]

As I previously replied unfortunately you won’t get a reply from Fitbit, everyone here is in the same boat. Me personally now going into week 12! 

[Knickels]

Question 1: Yes you can enter more than once.

Question 2: $299

[VMMage]

Geeeoooorrrgge, Fitbit is not doing itself any favors with the lack of information they are providing around the refund process.  What people can see and have reported are problems with the process, excessive delays, and very little feedback from Fitbit/Sedgwick.  Most just get a "be patient" or "we'll escalate".  What could Fitbit do about all this?  Lots of things, here's just a few off the top of my head:

1) Fitbit could provide a portal for self-service where people could see where they sit in the refund queue.  The issues surrounding the prior Force recall should have alerted them to this need.

2) Fitbit could provide a summary status of refunds:  number of refund requests, number of refunds completed, number of refunds processed in the past 3/7/10 days, number of open support tickets for refund issues, etc.

3) Fitbit could update the Frequently Asked Questions to provide more guidance regarding the problems they have had (and are addressing) regarding refund processing delays.

4) Fitbit could allow their moderators to actually answer questions in the forum thread.

In short, Fitbit could demonstrate that they really care about the refund process problems.  So far, they have opted to demonstrate a lack of caring.  That's a key reason why so many people are unhappy.

[FitbitUser1511]

George,

where did you get the information on the claims from March?  I have multiple watches I sent in in March that I have not gotten an email on yet, even though I was told they were processed in the first week of April.

[Geeeoooorrrgge]

@VMMage - I agree with all of this. You might have misunderstood me, I’m not defending FitBit one bit.

@FitbitUser1511 - Average times in the UK was just piecing together info from people posting on a few different forums. It’s not exact and probably can’t accurately predict going forward because it will be specific to the current load and number of people they have working through them, but does show they’re working through them.

The issues on launch, bits of background as a back-end software engineer, calls to FitBit and emails I’ve received from a claim. The delays I’ve seen are all specific to each country, with the UK ones it just locks the device instead of needing to post it in. I had a claim from the first week that got stuck and a claim I put in 1 month after was paid out before that one. I had a manual email from FitBit, not the 3rd party company, with a uniquely generated support ticket, saying ‘Apologies for the delay, we’ve now processed your order’, followed by the second ‘we’ve successfully deactivated your device, wait 3-6 weeks’ email, like a few other people on here have received. It shows they’re trying, they’ve dug through the first week claims in the UK and solved at least one of the issues that’s happened.

Some of the call staff at the UK company have let slip about some issues with the first week orders. I’d guess between the 3rd party company and FitBit, they didn’t scale their infrastructure enough to handle the load in the first week and didn’t have any retry mechanism for ones that failed. Part of the process in the UK involves FitBit communicating a message to the 3rd party company once they’ve deactivated the device, which in modern architecture would be an API or an event-driven queue like Kafka. If that API has an error for any reason, like a timeout because it can’t handle the load, there was no process to notify me as a user that something had gone wrong, because the form for deactivating the device was a fire and forget, you don’t receive a ‘this was successful, or this failed’ before you leave the page.

This doesn’t really help anyone, other than knowing they’re actually looking into things that have gone wrong and trying to remedy them on-scale for everyone affected by that issue - it just might take time.

[SunsetRunner]

Well said, my thoughts exactly

[dejrfan8151]

I have been waiting since March (not sure which date because every time I talk to someone I get a different date that the count down started) but all of them are well past the 3-6 week time frame.  Have call many times just to be told they have to escalate it and I will hear something back but never do, and the call center people are so rude and hang up on you.

[ShaunOR]

---

@Geeeoooorrrgge wrote:

This forum is designed as badly as the recall process. You click 'Reply' to a comment and once you post the comment, it doesn't give any indication who you were replying to. 😐

---

It took me ages to work out that you can actually quote the user and their quote when using the desktop version of the site.

Click on the reply button for the person you want to reply to and then in the box that appears, click on the 5th icon from the left (the double quotation mark), and it will then quote the user and their quote (just as I have done here). This only seems to be an option on the desktop version of the site rather than on a mobile... unless I'm missing something.

I hope this helps you and other people too so we can better work out who is replying to who!

[BevNoosa]

This process has been an absolute horror. Frustrating and, in my opinion, unprofessional.

I have been trying to process my recall since 31 March 2022.

I have spoken to many people and exchanged many emails trying to sort it out with out success.

I have been told today to talk to somebody in Australia. The phone number is continually busy and  the email address is not supported.

I have an email telling me Fitbit have finally verified my account and a refund will be processed in 3 - 6 weeks. They gave me a link to the discount process but that does not work. It keeps telling me that I have in excess of 5 units registered, an issue that has been there since day one. I have already proven I only have one unit.

About somebody took ownership of the problem and sorted out!

[Gemmiky]

I´ve trying everything, I have been calling to the phone of customer services in my country (Spain), I have been writing emails, and also I called to UK that is the telephone number for the refunds (I don´t understand why I have to call a foreign number, though), during more than 12 minutes and they didn´t understand why I didn´t have the refund yet, and they would call me with more info, so far, a week later, I don´t know anything about them.

I feel neglected by Fitbit, and you are passing the problem from one to another Fitbil made me turn my watch off, I had to buy another one (if I know it before, I don´t buy another fitbit), and now nobody is attending my case, this is not the Fitbit that I knew. I need that someone helps me, please.

Moderator Edit: Word choice

[kirkleach]

Why not just send us a check, or a prepaid card in the mail??? Instead of having multiple, confusing, hard to use options. Moderator Edit: Word choice.

[MP1978]

I agree, they definitely did not minimize the inconvenience to consumers.  I was hoping to encounter no difficulties in getting a satisfactory outcome with minimal effort, and it was completely the opposite.    

[Clintlgm]

I may have run across the real issue here. Its seems Google bought out FitBit a while back. Had I known this, I for one would have not purchased Fit Bit again. I, unfortunately, used my 40% off on a Charge 5 for my wife. Still waiting on $299 refund will probably use that on a Samsung. And sell this Sense I bought on Amazon on eBay!

[hirtenstab]

My previously email address which associated to my account is not available now. When I submitted refund ,I used another mail address, and I got a mail from fitbit: We can't find a Fitbit account associated with this email address, which is required to register for your refund. Please be sure you are attempting to register with the *same* email address you used when previously setting up your Fitbit account. If you no longer have access to that account, we recommend that you create an account with your preferred email address and connect your Ionic to that account.  So I created an account and reconnect the Ionic to the account. But when I tried to submit the refund at the the device disable step, the webpage shows there is no device connected to my account.  I wonder if my refund apply success or not, who can help me? 

Moderator Edit: Formatting

[jrubbi]

I'm wondering if anyone has had an issue with getting the refund for the Ionic. I sent the watch back and it was received over two months ago.  I checked in with customer service a few weeks after it had been received and was told a refund had been issued and to check my email.  After we had checked all folders and confirmed that it had not been received, I was told the case would be escalated and should hear back within 3-5 days.  I called back a week later to check on it and was told that the refund had not been issued and was still being processed but would be issued within 10 days.  I called back two weeks later and was told it was still processing and that each time I call and they escalate it, it goes to the back of the line.  I just tried to find out what's going on with it now and was told that there actually isn't a time frame for resolution when it get escalated and can take as long as it takes.  Has anyone else had such a hard time getting the refund? If so, find anything that worked to get it? TIA.

[SunsetRunner]

Sorry to tell you that there are very many with the same experience as yourself and there appears to be no way of resolving this for us. We wait for Fitbit to rectify this