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Jawbone users are furious about the lack of customer support

Jawbone users are furious about the lack of customer support

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Bought an UP, out of luck

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Jawbone Up2

When Jawbone’s first UP wristband malfunctioned for some of its users back in 2011, the consumer electronics company quickly issued an apology and offered full refunds of the activity-tracking wristband.

How things change.

Five years and several rounds of funding later, Jawbone’s customer support has completely faltered. Multiple Jawbone customers have said they’ve contacted Jawbone in recent months or weeks about faulty products and have not received any response. The Verge has tried calling a customer support number several times, and immediately heard an automated message that all circuits were busy, every time.

The company stopped responding to customers on its social media channels last month

While Jawbone no longer has any kind of online forum on its own website, the company’s social media pages also show signs of neglect. The last tweet from its @JawboneSupport Twitter handle was on December 21st, 2016. One of the exchanges that day occurred between a customer who had requested a replacement Up2 band in October; the tweeter from Jawbone replied that at the time, the company did not have any update for her.

The company’s Facebook page is devoid of company responses or interactions. While Jawbone has continued to post health-related articles from outside publishers, updating its Facebook page as recently as January 19th, the comments below each post appear to be possibly hidden from view. A Jawbone Facebook post with 125 comments below it was only partially visible to Verge editors.

“Customer Service?!?!” one woman wrote earlier this month. “Um. Customer service? Wtf,” another wrote. “Jawbone customer services don’t reply,” someone wrote on December 12th. Customers have left sad-face emoji on the company’s Facebook page. Also: poop emoji.

On Trustpilot.com, a kind of Better Business Bureau for the online age, the company has slipped to less than a one-star rating.

Jawbone declined to comment when asked about the lack of customer support.

The strange non-response from Jawbone — not to us, but to its customers — is the latest in a series of events that point to a troubled company, ranging from lawsuits to reported buyout offers. In recent months the top product executive and the chief financial officer have both left the company. The Verge has reported that Jawbone is in the process of working on medical-grade technology that it would sell to other businesses; for Jawbone, making that technology viable may not happen quickly enough.