Massive Google Outage

[CaptTom]

I woke up this morning at 6; my Nest (Google product) thermostat was programmed to dial the temperature up from 55 to 65 at 6:30. I reached for my phone and the app wouldn't connect to the Internet. Gmail also stopped updating.

There have been a few discussions over on a home automation forum I frequent, talking about the perils of depending on a cloud, or worse, C2C ("cloud to cloud") solution for anything as important as heating your house.

I get that it's far easier for the manufacturer to do everything on their end, so they don't have to worry about supporting whatever local install you have. And I've seen C2C solutions which are so easy to set up, you hardly know you're depending on your hardware, two other companies' hardware, and all the networking in between.

Then there's the risk that the manufacturer will declare your hardware obsolete after a few years (or in some cases, months) and shut down the servers. Or that all the personal data they collect will be sold to (or hacked by) organizations you'd rather not give that information to.

 

[JoeWras]

I got a presumably automatic reply from our administrators today saying my gmail account is responding to them that I don't exist, so they disabled email responses for me. I re-enabled and I'm getting responses, with no further bark-backs.

Sounds like the issue is still flowing through their system.

 

[OldShooter]

I got a presumably automatic reply from our administrators today saying my gmail account is responding to them that I don't exist, so they disabled email responses for me. I re-enabled and I'm getting responses, with no further bark-backs. ...

Yup. Me too.

I sent a couple of messages to another gmail user late PM yesterday. The first bounced no-such-use but the second, about 10 min later, went through. So I is apparently an intermittent thing.

Check your unread PM count.

 

[athena53]

There have been a few discussions over on a home automation forum I frequent, talking about the perils of depending on a cloud, or worse, C2C ("cloud to cloud") solution for anything as important as heating your house.

I get that it's far easier for the manufacturer to do everything on their end, so they don't have to worry about supporting whatever local install you have. And I've seen C2C solutions which are so easy to set up, you hardly know you're depending on your hardware, two other companies' hardware, and all the networking in between.

Then there's the risk that the manufacturer will declare your hardware obsolete after a few years (or in some cases, months) and shut down the servers. Or that all the personal data they collect will be sold to (or hacked by) organizations you'd rather not give that information to.

I know. I got this thermostat for free in exchange for my agreement that they can ratchet up my temperature setting by 2 degrees during peak periods of A/C demand, and a $25 annual bill credit. Ordinarily I love it- I can set the heat to 50 degrees if I'll be gone a few days and then start it heating up again when I'm a few hours from home.

They did once push a faulty upgrade to the software- I'm convinced that was the issue because it took forever for their help line people to get back to me and they had to walk me through a complete reset of the system.

 

[Lawrencewendall]

I got a presumably automatic reply from our administrators today saying my gmail account is responding to them that I don't exist, so they disabled email responses for me. I re-enabled and I'm getting responses, with no further bark-backs.

Sounds like the issue is still flowing through their system.

Got the same message. Went in and re-enabled it

 

[Aerides]

Got the same message. Went in and re-enabled it

About half of the mods have had the same thing - and yes re-enabling seems to work.

Funny though, i have gmail and didn't get the email.

 

[MichaelB]

I reported this to the help desk.

 

[Walt34]

This is too eerie. Last night I watched Live Free or Die Hard on Amazon Prime. (Hey, I like movies with lots of shooting and explosions.)