Google’s Nest service has been down once, twice, thrice, four times, no, scratch that, at least five times in five months, four of which were in the last few weeks. A similar thing happened toward the end of 2018. After each failure, a fix, an apology, more disgruntled users, and hours lost without any security recording for owners of the brand’s cameras. Seeing the same headline with the same story every day proves that we can’t solely rely on remote servers for the smart home, and local fallbacks need to be the first feature baked in, not an afterthought or a bonus.
I’m not singling out Nest here, but since we focus on Google’s products on Android Police, we’ve been monitoring the brand a lot more closely than others and thus tend to be more aware of issues affecting its services. Outages have occurred in almost every server-reliant smart home device I’ve ever used, from Canary to Philips Hue, and are possibly even more frequent with security cameras (or maybe people notice and report them more there).
Nest outages reported on Downdetector in March 2020.
While most of these down times will be harmless for the majority of users, they’ll still be detrimental to a small number of people. If the server is down and your smart camera doesn’t catch a hit-and-run outside your house, or your alarm doesn’t alert you of a burglary, the system has absolutely, irrefutably failed you. You’ll never trust it again, will you?
And if the past few years with smart home gear have taught us anything, it’s that server issues are inevitable. There’s no if or maybe, the only question is when and how frequently.
10 important Nest outages since November 2019. (I removed minor ones with
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