Some original Chromecast dongles are no longer working, and nobody knows why

Google’s original Chromecast may finally be running out of road. More than a decade after the little HDMI dongle helped make casting a mainstream feature, a growing number of first-generation Chromecast owners are suddenly finding that their devices are failing to work.

Reports started piling up across Reddit this week, with users saying their 2013 Chromecast models are no longer appearing as cast targets in apps like YouTube and HBO Max (via 9to5Google). The failures, curiously enough, are inconsistent. Some owners say Spotify and Disney+ still work as normal.

This inconsistency is what has people wondering if Google quietly pulled the plug or if something else is breaking behind the scenes.

The original Chromecast launched in 2013 with a pretty basic premise: tap a button on your phone and instantly throw content onto your TV. It cost just $35 and became one of Google’s biggest hardware success stories and helped push streaming into the mainstream long before smart TVs became standard. As time went on, Google added newer Chromecasts, Chromecast Audio, and, eventually, Google TV-powered devices to the lineup. More than 100 million Chromecast units were sold globally before Google retired the branding in favor of the newer Google TV Streamer.

Still, Google officially ended software updates for the first-generation Chromecast in 2023. At the time, the company warned that going forward, owners “may notice a degradation in performance.” What’s happening right now looks a lot worse than the occasional sluggishness.

Reddit users in the now-viral thread say many first-generation devices stopped working around the same time, leading to speculation that some backend change may have finally pushed the aging hardware over the edge. Some users even accused Google of deliberately forcing the upgrade, but there is no proof to support this theory at the moment.

What makes the situation even more interesting is the fact that Google had a major Chromecast failure in recent history. In March 2025, second-generation Chromecast and Chromecast Audio devices suddenly started throwing “Untrusted device” errors, which users traced back to expired security certificates baked into the hardware. In response to widespread backlash, Google later rolled out a fix via the Google Home app.

Google hasn’t publicly acknowledged the latest wave of failures, but this new first-gen issue looks different. Instead, apps just don’t recognize the old Chromecast in many cases. Android Authority has reached out to Google for comment and will update this article when the company responds.

A real fix may never come for affected owners. Google might just point back to its old end-of-life notice instead of issuing a new patch, because the device hasn’t gotten updates in years. The company already moved on to more premium hardware with the Google TV Streamer that costs significantly more than the original Chromecast ever did.