Your Fire TV Stick just lost a very useful feature - Amazon confirms new block

Amazon Fire TV Stick

If you’ve noticed that a handy virtual remote feature has suddenly disappeared from your Fire TV Stick you are definitely not alone. Amazon has confirmed that it’s temporarily removed the ability to use your phone, tablet or PC as a Fire TV controller after security experts uncovered a concerning glitch with the popular function.

Until this block came into force, Fire TV Stick users could simply scan a QR code on their televisions with a neat remote then popping up on the screen of devices such as iPhones and iPads.

Not only did the virtual controller feature volume and channel changing keys but also a full qwerty keyboard making it faster and easier to type and search for content.

As spotted by the team at AFTVnews, this feature was recently disabled after experts found that the QR code could lead to hackers being able to install apps on Fire devices without permission.

It’s unclear if anyone was actually affected by the flaw by Amazon clearly felt then needed to fix it rather than risk anyone becoming a victim of a cyber attack.

The security blunder is reportedly in part due to the fact the device scanning the QR code doesn’t need to be on the same Wi-Fi network as the Fire TV Stick, and you don’t need to login to your Amazon account.

Currently when you scan the QR code to use your phone as an input device, a message on the screen reads, “This page is currently down for scheduled maintenance. Please check back later.”

Speaking about the removal of the service, Amazon told AFTVnews, “We appreciate the work of independent researchers to help bring issues to our attention.

“While we’re still reviewing this research, we immediately disabled the QR feature at issue for Fire TV customers, which fully mitigates the scenario described by the researchers. We look forward to bringing this feature back for customers soon.”

Hopefully a fix will be released in the coming weeks and you’ll soon be able to access the virtual remote without any issues.

We’ll update this article as soon as we hear more or the virtual remote controller is restored.