Jordan O'BrienThe smart home is supposed to make a homeowner’s life simpler, especially if they use a smart speaker. Unfortunately, when you put devices in the hands of the cloud, there may come a time where those devices become inoperable – as proven by yesterday’s Google Home and Chromecast outage.
For around 12 hours yesterday, the Google Home smart speaker and Chromecast dongle were inaccessible for millions of customers. It wasn’t just the Google Home that was affected either, with the Home Mini and Home Max also seeing downtime.
Google hasn’t confirmed the reasoning behind the outage, but the downtime meant that users were unable to use their smart speaker at all. In fact, any command sent to the smart speaker was met with a response of ‘there was a glitch, please try again in a few seconds’.
The outage first hit the US west coast, but seems to have affected people globally, with reports from the UK, Spain, Ireland, India, and more all streaming in on social media. What’s more, those with a Google Chromecast were unable to stream content from their phones, laptops or tablets to the TV, despite the Chromecast protocol still working on other devices.
While the outage has now ceased, there was a fix for users who were having problems – and apparently it couldn’t be easier. In fact, Google was recommending that users simply unplug their device and then plug it back in. While that didn’t work for everyone, it managed to get more than a few up and running.
What To Do When Smart Devices Go Down?
This isn’t the first time a smart home device has faced an outage. In fact, it’s not even the first time Google has had to contend with major downtime like this, with its Nest subsidiary suffering a three-hour outage back in May. That left users unable to control their smart thermostats or cameras completely, rendering both the app and any voice command sent through a smart speaker, useless.
This is why the custom install industry relies on many smart devices that don’t have to be connected to the cloud 24/7. A Crestron or Control4 system should continue working even when there’s no internet, although they will have to have a network connection. In those circumstances even the best smart home systems will lose their remote controllability, but at least those inside the house will still be able to turn the lights on.