According to Nest Labs, the company has sold no less than 10 million units. A large number of households utilize Nest thermostats and security cameras. Even the company’s smart smoke detectors are popular among consumers. As connected devices, every Nest product relies upon an internet connection and a connection to Nest’s servers. A recent outage of the latter connection shows the inherent weakness of smart home devices.
Nest Users Report A Widespread Outage
Nest users started reporting a service outage on May 16. Virtually all users couldn’t access the Nest app, or access Nest through the web portal. Based on user reports, the outage started sometime in the evening and persisted for a few hours. A lack of access meant that users couldn’t check security camera fees. Likewise, they couldn’t lock or unlock their door locks, or even change the temperatures for thermostats.
Users of the Nest Protect wouldn’t know if a smoke detector went off at home, either.
A Quick Response And A Relatively Quick Solution
Fortunately, Nest Labs caught onto the outage from the beginning. The company spent a few hours working on the problem before restoring app and web portal access. Lock and unlock functionality and other features remained disabled for a few more hours, too. Without a doubt, Nest handled the situation in the best manner possible. No major reports mentioned any serious consequences from this outage aside from panic.
Also, it should be noted that all devices continued to “work” during the outage.
Still, the entire ordeal shows the issues with connected smart devices. People start to depend on them, but they fail from time to time. A power outage, disabled internet connection, or server issues render these devices useless. They become regular “dumb” devices like their non-connected counterparts at that point. While they still continue to function in many cases, their smart features become disabled.
Cameras keep recording, locks continue to lock, and thermostats keep running. In the end, outages for smart devices have the potential to cause a lot of problems. If someone isn’t home during an outage, then they have no idea what’s going on there. Nest fixed this outage with minimal downtime. In recent times, Nest devices haven’t suffered many widespread outages, which is commendable. It remains to be seen what measures Nest takes to ensure such an outage doesn’t occur with any frequency in the future.
Dil Bole Oberoi
