When in doubt - don't brick your hardware

Being an Xfinity Home customer I've had two interesting experiences with their hardware. The user experience have been weird at best.

First it apparently failed to download and install a firmware update in the middle of the night. Likely because the system was armed and a reboot during an armed state would be potentially an undesirable thing in case something happened during reboot. So the next time I tried to arm the system it immediately started the alarm. I called support and it took a reboot to force it to install the firmware update. Would it be too much to ask if the system knew it needed a reboot and prompt the user (me) instead of triggering the alarm when I try to arm it? Even better if it just rebooted when I disarmed the system when  the update was pending.

Second time there had been a power outage in my neighborhood for a few hours so the alarm system was on backup power for a while. During the outage there was a notification that the system had lost connection to the monitoring center. Once power was back the system apparently never regained contact with the monitoring center. The system still behaved as if it worked normally except notification emails were not sent. Took two weeks before the security company contacted me informing me that the alarm was not working properly. How to fix it? A reboot... A reboot that bricked the hardware and they had to send a technician out to replace parts of the system.

It seems to me like a product like an alarm system should be developed using the basic principal of reverting to a simple fail safe state when anything unknown happens and try to recover from there. Kind of like the crash of a Swedish fighter jet in 1993 in downtown Stockholm. In footage you can see the airplane automatically go into a safe state when it stalls; putting its frond wings in a position to provide maximum lift. It is obvious not everybody thinks the way I think...