Google Home outage left Nest devices stuck and unresponsive

What you need to know

• Google Home and Nest suffered a widespread outage, leaving devices unresponsive, routines broken, and Nest Hub screens stuck on white or loading screens.
• Multiple Nest devices were affected, including Nest Hubs, Nest Minis, Google Home speakers, and some third-party Assistant displays.
• Users reported widespread failures, including broken voice commands, slow responses, failed routines, and frozen screens.

Google Home and Nest users experienced a widespread outage that left some devices unresponsive, routines broken, and Nest Hub displays stuck on white or loading screens. It looked like the problem was on Google's side, and it affected users in a number of regions.

The outage impacted Nest Hubs, Nest Minis, Google Home speakers, and some third-party displays that use the Assistant. Over at Reddit, users reported voice commands not working, slow responses, failed routines, and screens stuck on blank white or loading animations. That the same behavior occurred on multiple devices suggested a server problem as opposed to a spate of hardware failures.

That also explains why the usual troubleshooting playbook wasn't working either. Some owners rebooted their devices and routers, while others went as far as performing factory resets. In many instances those steps made no difference. Some Nest Hub owners have reported that their devices remain stuck on a white or loading screen, even after a reset.

Android Central managing editor Derrek Lee experienced the problem firsthand shortly before going to bed. He said a voice command to turn off his TV failed initially, with Google Assistant responding that something had gone wrong and asking him to try again. When he repeated the command about a minute later, it took roughly 30 seconds for the TV to turn off instead of happening almost instantly.

The outage wasn't a quick blip either. Downdetector showed complaints from the US and other countries rising rapidly overnight. The incident was making the rounds, and hundreds of reports were being logged. Furthermore, StatusGator logged a plethora of user-submitted reports, with some coming in just a few minutes ago, indicating a few users are still affected by the outage. That said, the service's status on the site shows everything is working fine.

Android Central has contacted Google for comment.

The incident revealed an awkward Achilles heel of cloud-dependent smart homes. Google's servers power voice commands, device controls, and routines that can make working hardware appear to be broken when the backend goes down.

At the time, Google had not publicly explained in detail what had caused the problem. Some users later reported their devices were back online, but the outage posed a larger question: As Google moves Nest and Home toward more automation, how much of the smart home should be dependent on Google's cloud being up?