If you’re a big Google Home user then you’ll have noticed a fairly big outage for Google Home over the last 24-36 hours. The good news is that it appears to be over and Google has begun emailing out apologies for the outage.
The outage hit not only Google Home, but also Chromecast as well, with Google Home giving the frustrating error ‘something went wrong’, while some apps which normally support Chromecasting content were not showing the option.
The issue was fairly widespread, though didn’t affect everyone. I was using Google Home to play podcasts from Pocket Casts at the time when reports were rolling in, and then used it a few times to turn lights on and off, check weather and time, but it appears I was in the minority.
Rishi Chandra, Google’s VP of Product Management and General Manager of Home Products has sent out an email to Google Home user overnight explaining what happened.
You may have noticed a problem with your Google Home yesterday morning. We found a glitch with one of our backend systems and spent the day working hard to get everyone back up and running. It’s frustrating when technology doesn’t work the way it should, especially when you’re depending on it. We’re sorry that this happened.
There’s a fix rolling out to all Google Home devices now. If you’re still having trouble, let us know here.
Thanks for sticking with us.
– rishi, on behalf of the Google Home team
The fix is rolling out to Google Home now, and if you are experiencing issues you should definitely hit the link to report the issues.
I am one of the lucky unaffected ones who has used Google Home extensively in recent days, mainly for setting alarms, standalone streaming of radio and podcasts and getting time and weather info. However I am a big user of Gboard voice typing on my Android phone and it has been down in recent days (it is still not working for me). Has anybody else experienced this?
I couldn’t Chromecast the World Cup, though I could connect to my device to manage it. Thought I was going crazy! Yesterday I spent ages swapping Chromecast devices around trying to work out what had gone wrong until I saw the headline about the outage! Haven’t had an email from Google though.
It wasn’t only the Google Home devices but any Android app that could Chromecast. No CC icon in the apps. was fixed early yesterday.
You know that’s actually what’s written in the article right?
I was unable to set an alarm to wake me up for work the next morning as the Google Home was not accepting what I was saying.
My Homi mini kept mentioning a glitch that morning. Chromecast issue was more annoying. We have 2, and the one I did not want to use was fine. The one I did want to use would not show up but I could access it via the Google Home app. Pretty annoying and my troubleshooting got me nowhere.
A few times yesterday i did use the google home and it came back with something like i can’t seem to help you .
At the time i just thought it was me asking it questions beyond it’s capabilities.
I did think however at the time google home should have known that.
I have yet to sus it out today .