Google's entire Home infrastructure has suffered a serious outage, with millions of customers on Wednesday morning complaining that their smart devices have stopped working.
At the time of writing, the service is still down, and appears to have been knackered for at least the past 10 hours.
Users in Google's home state of California started complaining that their Google Home, Mini, and Chromecast devices were not working around midnight Pacific Time on Tuesday, and the issue appeared in every country in which the Google Home devices are sold.
But it was only when the United States started waking up on Wednesday morning – the US has the vast majority of Google Home devices – that the reports started flooding in, pointing to an outage of the entire system.
Google has confirmed its systems are down, but has so far provided no other information, saying only that it is investigating the issue.
A graph showing two things: an outage and a concentration of devices in the US ... Source: Downdetector.com
It is possible that the outage is related to a similar, unusual outage at Slack earlier today. So far, though, the most likely cause is a software update that Google published around the same time as the first complaints of downtime came in, an update that added the Spanish language to its devices.
Netizens have been reporting that even after a reboot the devices don't work, suggesting either that the entire Home infrastructure has fallen over – which seems incredibly unlikely given that fact that it is Google we're talking about and it has massive worldwide network redundancy to fall back on – or the devices themselves have gone awry following an update.
We will update this article as and when Google provides any more information. In the meantime everyone is just going to have to shelve their voice-controlled Google assistants – and find out the time by looking at their watch, or check their calendar on their phone or laptop, or turn up the thermostat using the ancient but reliable technology known as fingers. ®