Last night, Nest Ecosystem users were transported back to the Dark Ages when access to the Nest app and web browsers went offline. In a world of increasing dependability on the internet, an outage like that meant confronting an inconvenient reality: what happens when a smart home goes dark.
Entire Nest Ecosystem of Smart Home Devices Goes Offline
According to The Verge, Nest product owners couldn’t control their devices for a couple of hours during the night. Nest reported working on restoring access to these devices as of 12:30 AM ET, and that Nest products were brought back online around 2:21 AM ET. The Verge states, “The devices remained (mostly) operational, they just weren’t accessible by any means other than physical controls. You know, just like the plain old dumb devices these more expensive and more cumbersome smart devices replaced.”
Nest’s System Failure Shows What Happens When Your Smart Home Goes Dark
“That’s right, all the safety failsafes worked, so for those customers that had Nest smart locks keeping their home safe, the doors didn’t suddenly swing open like a Hollywood prison drama, they just had non-smart locks on them for a bit,” says TechRadar. They go on to say that other devices being affected were security cameras and baby monitors, which was a bit more inconvenient than having to manually turn your lock.