FIELD NOTES · JULY 2026

iRobot filed for bankruptcy. What happens to your Roomba?

On December 14, 2025, iRobot — the company that made "robot vacuum" a household phrase — filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in Delaware. Your Roomba did not get the memo. It rolled off its charging dock the next morning and cleaned the kitchen exactly the way it always has. The interesting question isn't whether it keeps working this week. It's what happens over the next five years, and how much of that is in your hands. More than you'd think, as it turns out.

What actually happened

The short version: iRobot and two affiliates filed a prepackaged Chapter 11 — a bankruptcy where the outcome is negotiated before the paperwork lands. Its largest creditor, Shenzhen-based contract manufacturer Picea Robotics (the company that already built the robots), agreed to convert claims reported at roughly $254 million into 100% of the reorganized equity. The court confirmed the plan on January 22, 2026, and iRobot emerged the next day as a private company. Existing shares were cancelled and the stock left Nasdaq.

How it got there is a story in three acts. Amazon's planned acquisition collapsed in January 2024 after European regulators signaled they would block it. Then 2024 results landed hard: revenue of $682 million, down 23% year over year, with a $145 million net loss. Add the debt taken on to stay afloat after the deal died, plus new tariff costs — the filing lists $3.4 million owed to U.S. Customs — and by December 2025 the math stopped working.

What did the company tell Roomba owners? That operations would continue as normal, with no expected disruption to app functionality, customer programs, or product support. After emerging, CEO Gary Cohen said the company came out "with an improved financial foundation and additional capacity to invest in the next generation of smart home robotics." The new structure also includes iRobot Safe Corp., a U.S. subsidiary with an independent American board and a U.S.-based data security officer, built to keep American customer data ring-fenced from the new ownership. The robots, in other words, are fine. The company that answers when they phone home has new owners.

What still works, and what breaks first

A Roomba is really two products. One is a vacuum: motors, a main brush, a side brush, a filter, a battery and a set of sensors. The other is a service: the app, the cloud account, the maps, the firmware pipeline. A bankruptcy court cannot repossess the vacuum half. The service half runs on servers that somebody has to keep paying for.

The vacuum half needs no cloud at all. Press CLEAN and the robot cleans; navigation runs on the robot itself, not on a server. The dock still charges it. Spot cleaning still works from the shell buttons. Models old enough to have scheduling buttons on the faceplate — much of the 600, 700, 800 and 900 series — even keep their schedules with the internet unplugged.

The service half is where degradation would show up. App control, cleaning schedules on app-era models, Smart Maps, room-by-room cleaning, keep-out zones, voice assistant hooks and firmware updates all route through iRobot's cloud. And orphaned devices rarely die with an announcement. The pattern across the industry is a slow fade: the app stops getting updates, then stops installing on new phones, then one day a login quietly fails. iRobot says none of this is planned. This guide exists because "planned" and "guaranteed" are different words.

Your personal exposure comes down to three questions. Does your model have scheduling buttons on the shell, or does its calendar live in the app? Do you actually use Smart Maps and keep-out zones, or does the robot just do the whole floor anyway? And has it received a firmware update recently — a sign the pipeline is alive? A 675 owner who presses CLEAN on the way out the door would barely notice a cloud outage. A j7+ owner running room-by-room schedules around a napping toddler would notice the same afternoon. Same bankruptcy, very different stakes.

Where your model stands today

"Is my robot still supported?" has a checkable answer, and it changes. The table below renders live from our model-by-model support dataset: current status, how much each model depends on the cloud, and the last firmware date we could verify. Every row carries a source.

We re-verify these rows on a rolling basis. Bookmark the Roomba support-status page for the living version, or the cross-brand view if you also run a Roborock. A model marked orphaned isn't a dead robot — it's a robot whose maker has stopped answering. The rest of this guide is about that gap.

The keep-it-running plan

None of this requires soldering or a weekend. It's five moves, most of them under twenty minutes, and they're worth doing while iRobot's servers and support pages are still fully online — insurance is cheapest before the storm.

Repair it or replace it?

Orphaned is not worthless. A 2019 Roomba i7 with a fresh battery, new brushes and a clean filter cleans exactly as well as it did in 2019 — the floors haven't changed. Saab stopped making cars in 2011 and Saab drivers still buy parts; robot vacuums are far simpler machines with far larger installed bases.

Repair when the failure is a consumable, a battery, a wheel module or a sensor cleaning away — which covers most of the error codes we document. Replace when the mainboard dies, when a repair quote passes half the price of a robot you'd actually want, or when the features you use daily are exactly the cloud features at risk. And if you do buy new — any brand — treat cloud dependency as a spec, and check the maker's support record on the support-status page before paying.

iRobot survived its bankruptcy; the new owners say the cloud stays on, and so far it has. But the lesson of December 2025 is older than any one company: the parts of your robot you can hold will outlast the parts you can only log into. Stock the shelf, save the PDFs, learn the buttons. With that done, your Roomba can survive anything short of the stairs.