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Google Wifi

Google has now taken ii swings at making your dwelling wireless router smarter, and it'due south seeing minor success with the second one. The recently released Google Wifi mesh routers have been well-reviewed and they're priced competitively with other mesh networking solutions. Nevertheless, the company temporarily broke a large number of routers recently cheers to an error in its cloud services. Maybe those fancy Google routers are seeming a fleck less smart today.

The event affected both the older OnHub routers ($200 at launch) and the new Google Wifi organization (priced between $129 and $299 depending on how many nodes you want). Owners at beginning idea it was a botched firmware update, which are downloaded in the groundwork every couple of weeks. All the same, Google afterwards said information technology had not pushed whatever updates. The plot thickens.

Those affected report that their networks went offline with blueish blinking lights from the OnHub and orange blinking lights from the Google Wifi nodes. The suddenness of the outage led many to believe their devices were lacking in some mode, and so Google's support lines were flooded with angry customers. It took a few hours to become everything sorted out.

Now that the dust has settled, Google explains the outage was acquired past a bug in the Google Account Engine. Setting up and managing one of these devices requires a Google account, which at least explains the connection. The routers occasionally ping Google servers for authorisation, and on February 23rd the server was sending back an fault message. Through some esoteric fallback mechanism in the routers, this caused them to reset to factory settings. Then, a problem on Google'southward servers can reset your router. Oops.

The OnHub router.

Luckily, the hardware is fine and owners were able to reconfigure the network. That'south an badgerer for most people, merely those with complex mesh setups with multiple main nodes probably had a pretty crummy dark. The reset also meant all DNS and device settings were lost. Google'due south routers aren't peculiarly expert at extracting the right name from continued devices, and then owners also have to add all the custom device names again.

A failed update could have caused much more severe problems, up to and including permanently bricking the device. At least that would accept only happened one time. Some owners of OnHubs and Google Wifi are worried another server mistake could interruption their networks at any time. Google hasn't noted any specific steps information technology'due south taking to preclude this. These aren't cheap routers. It's reasonable to expect them to go on working in spite of whatsoever issues Google's servers are having.