Google Home's annoying SiriusXM glitch is finally gone

For well over a month now, Google Home users have been unable to play SiriusXM content on speakers. There’s finally some good news on this front, as a fix has just been announced.

Back in late May, Reddit user Phanatic4 took to the Google Home subreddit to complain that speakers in their home suddenly refused to play SiriusXM. This is despite checking the status of their subscription, removing and re-linking the account, and rebooting the devices. All they’d get back from their speaker was: “I looked for that, but it either isn’t available or can’t be played right now.”

Fast forward to this week, and Google’s Nest Community account has finally announced that it has fixed this particular bug, much to the relief of those impacted.

While the underlying reasons for the loss of service weren’t provided, one user posited last month that this only appeared to affect numbered satellite channels, suggesting that internet-exclusive or app-only content was unaffected. This is only a theory at this point, and it’s hard to point to a specific root cause without Google sharing more information.

The sheer scale of the complaints under that Reddit thread suggests the issue was quite widespread. Keeping this in mind, it’s quite surprising that Google Home had to wait a full month to identify and fix this particular glitch. Imagine SiriusXM being a part of your daily media consumption routine, only to stop working one day. Meanwhile, one person claims they were redirected to TuneIn, even though they or others in their family didn’t have an account.

For its part, though, Google did notify at least one affected user that it could “potentially take weeks” to investigate and identify “permanent solutions” to this SiriusXM-related issue on Home speakers.

It’s worth remembering that even though SiriusXM refused to play content on Google Home speakers, listeners could still access content normally via the SiriusXM app.

Google Home devices are no strangers to irritating glitches, with Google typically acknowledging the issues and promising a fix. While the same has happened in this case, it has taken a little longer than you may have expected.

If you’ve avoided playing SiriusXM on your Google Home speaker due to this specific bug, be sure to give it another try right away. This development comes just on the eve of the Google Home Speaker’s retail debut, which has already been unboxed and detailed.