Has your Google Home speaker stopped responding to you? Is it stuck in a loop talking about a glitch? Well, you’re not alone as Google Home and Chromecast devices are suffering an outage across the globe.
Google has confirmed that its smart speaker and streaming dongle is suffering from an ongoing problem that affects ‘some’ users worldwide. On being called out for help, Google Home speakers have been spewing out errors like, ‘Something went wrong, try again in a few seconds’ or ‘There was a glitch. Try again in a few seconds.’
The first reports of Google Home suffering from an unknown glitch started to trickle in around 6:30 a.m PST (or 7 p.m IST) on Reddit, Google Product Forum, and Twitter, of course!
@madebygoogle Hey Google, Google Home Mini and Chrome Cast are not working at all. Any workaround on this? #googlehome #chromecast #glitch pic.twitter.com/3NJZOgIYMB
— Andrew Abogado (@andrewabogado) June 27, 2018
https://twitter.com/misssippimoon/status/1012074504418361344
It wasn’t until later in the day (or late night in India) that Google shared details on the outage saying that its systems were having an issue. Some users speculate that Google was trying to solve the issues where the smart speaker revealed the user location and it yanked the service offline instead.
We're sorry to hear some of our users are experiencing issues with their Google Home and Chromecast. We're on it. Stay tuned for updates.
— Made By Google (@madebygoogle) June 27, 2018
A couple hours down the road, Google tweeted out a temporary fix for the Google Home and Chromecast outage. It requested users to reboot their devices and to get it up and running right away, or wait a few hours for the fix to kick in automatically. Google further asks users to contact the support team if their speakers don’t start working after the reboot.
We have a fix for Google Home and Chromecast. It will automatically roll out within the next 6 hours. To get back up and running now, reboot your device → https://t.co/CM4ov63F46. Thanks for sticking with us!
— Made By Google (@madebygoogle) June 27, 2018
Google has already identified the issue, which stemmed from their backend system that supports both Google Home and Chromecast infrastructure. It is currently working on a fix to get the millions of smart speakers working again – so that Google Assistant doesn’t leave them hanging. A Google Home team member issued a statement on Reddit saying,
We’ve identified a fix for the issue impacting Google Home and Chromecast users and it will be automatically rolled out over the next 6 hours. We are really sorry for the inconvenience and are taking steps to prevent this issue from happening in the future.
Now that Google Home has been faced with such a lengthy outage, users on Reddit are now discussing solutions such as ‘local commands’ for the same. The fix still hasn’t been rolled out but we’ll keep you updated. Did your Google Home face an outage as well? Let us know in the comments below.
