Air fryers have been recalled six separate times by the Consumer Product Safety Commission since early 2022, more than any other small kitchen appliance category in the agency’s own public recall database. Pressure cookers are next, with four recalls logged since 2023, according to the same federal records. Blenders show three. Coffee makers, electric kettles, and toaster ovens each appear once. If you’ve bought a countertop air fryer sometime in the last five years, the odds that it’s one of the roughly 3.3 million units caught up in those six actions are higher than most people would guess, and the pattern behind why keeps repeating itself.
The Numbers, Straight From CPSC’s Own Filings
Start with the largest one. In 2023, CPSC and Atekcity announced a recall of two million COSORI air fryers after the agency logged more than 200 reports of a wiring defect that could ignite the internal components, including 23 reports of property damage. That single case is bigger than the entire five-year pressure cooker recall count combined. Add in the two separate Best Buy recalls of Insignia-brand air fryers, one in 2022 and another in 2024, plus the 2023 Empower Brands recall of roughly a million Power XL Dual Basket units, and you’ve got a single appliance category that’s been pulled back or corrected almost annually.
Compare that to the runner-up. SharkNinja’s 2025 recall of 1.8 million Foodi pressure cookers is the largest single pressure cooker action in the same window, but it’s the fourth pressure cooker recall in five years, not the sixth or seventh. Air fryers aren’t just ahead by a unit count. They’re ahead by frequency, which is the number that actually tells you whether a category has a design or manufacturing problem it hasn’t solved yet, rather than one bad batch.
Why the Same Hazard Keeps Showing Up
Read through the recall notices and the underlying fault is nearly identical across brands. Internal wiring or a heating element sits close to a plastic housing, and under sustained high heat, that housing can melt, crack, or ignite. COSORI’s notice cited a wire connector that wasn’t rated for the current it was carrying. The Insignia recalls, in both years, described the basket or heating chamber components overheating enough to scorch or burn nearby material. Power XL’s issue centered on the basket’s inner pot potentially detaching during use, spraying hot food. These aren’t identical products, but they share a category-wide engineering challenge: cramming a high-wattage convection heater into a compact countertop shell, then selling it at a price point where corners on wiring insulation and thermal cutoffs are the easiest place to save a few dollars.
It’s also worth noting that air fryers only became a mass-market product around 2018, so the entire five-year recall window essentially covers the category’s first real stress test at scale. A slower-maturing product line, like traditional toasters or coffee makers, has had decades to iron out the same thermal and wiring kinks.
What This Actually Means If You Own One
None of this means every air fryer on the market is dangerous. It means the category has posted the highest recall frequency of any small kitchen appliance CPSC tracks, and if you own a COSORI, Insignia, or Power XL unit purchased in the applicable years, checking the model number against CPSC’s notices takes about two minutes. Each recall notice lists the specific model numbers, date codes, and remedy, which for most of these cases has been a free replacement unit or refund rather than a repair kit you install yourself.
The broader lesson isn’t to swear off air fryers. It’s to treat any high-wattage countertop appliance the way you’d treat a space heater: register the product when you buy it, keep the box or receipt long enough to match a model number later, and don’t assume that because an appliance is small, its failure mode is minor too.
There’s a practical habit worth picking up here too. Most people toss the little paper insert that comes packed with a new appliance, the one with a mail-in registration card or a QR code, within the first week of owning it. That insert is the fastest way a manufacturer can reach you directly if a fault turns up later, rather than hoping you happen to see a recall notice on the news or scroll past it on social media months after the fact. It takes under a minute to register a product online, and it’s the difference between getting a direct email when your specific model number is flagged and finding out secondhand, if you find out at all.
Six recalls in five years, concentrated in one category, is CPSC’s own data telling you where the actual risk has been sitting on your counter. The category isn’t going anywhere, and neither is the underlying engineering challenge of packing a compact, high-heat convection element into a plastic housing sold at a competitive price. Checking your model number against the agency’s open recalls costs you nothing and takes less time than the appliance itself needs to preheat.
