Google Home devices should now be up and running again

The convenience of a full-blown smart home setup is one of those things that’s difficult to truly appreciate until you’re really living it — and once you are, just as hard to go back from. Being able to control everything from the lights to the temperature with just a few voice commands is the kind of luxury that’s very easy to get used to, but what do you do when all that control infrastructure breaks down? That’s just what Google Home users have been dealing with since late yesterday evening, but the good news is that their ordeal is finally over.

Google confirms in comments across Reddit’s Google Home sub:

We resolved an issue impacting various functions across Google Home & Nest devices.

The company goes on to apologize to users for the service disruption.

Google Home users first spotted signs of problems late last night, with Home and Nest devices failing to respond to commands. While smart displays hung on blank screens, failing to process voice commands, we found that we were still able to control devices manually through the Home app on phones.

The outage appeared particularly widespread, impacting multiple device types, including speakers and even the old Lenovo Smart Clock. While it seems that symptoms have persisted for at least some users for the better part of 12 hours, as of early this afternoon, Google now says that the incident should finally be over.

For as convenient as Google Home can be, problems like this one continue to remind us of how smart home setups reliant upon remote servers are always at the risk of connectivity failures. Maybe it’s time to start thinking about a fully offline smart home solution?