Google Home Speakers and Chromecast Are Down Worldwide, Company Confirms (washingtonpost.com) 65
"Sorry, something went wrong. Try again in a few seconds." That's the response that Google smart speaker users around the world heard Wednesday when they asked their devices to play music, get the weather or even respond to its "Hey, Google" prompt. From a report: Google confirmed there's a problem with both their smart speakers and the Chromecast, the plug-in video casting dongle for televisions. While the company did not say how many people are affected or what caused the issue, it did confirm it's working on a fix. "We're aware of an issue affecting some Google Home and Chromecast users. We're investigating the issue and working on a solution," Google said in a statement. Google Home and Chromecast owners started reporting issues to Google early Wednesday morning, according to online help forums for both devices. Devices affected by the problem have lost their normal functions.
Soooo (Score:1, Funny)
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
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This is why... (Score:3)
explicitly bought a media player that has an Ethernet port and is a dlna client, while running a dlna server on my main PC.
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If you haven't manually blocked automatic firmware updates, you may not be in a much better position.
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If you had already removed all Google and Amazon syping devices from your home, you'd already be better off.
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I don't have Google Speaker this, Alexa that, Smart ass wiper, etc, etc ad nauseum. So please explain how/why I'm not in a good position?
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How do you know your ethernet-connected media player isn't phoning home on you?
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Does your DLNA player get automatic firmware updates? Are you sure? Any one of them can break your network connection. If this was a simple problem, Google would have rolled back the firmware to a known good version by now. It sounds like the devices cannot connect to the Internet - possibly not even the LAN.
This really seems to have nothing to do with the externalized processing.
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I don't have Google Speaker this, Alexa that, Smart ass wiper, etc, etc ad nauseum. So please explain how/why I'm not in a good position?
My Smart Ass-WIper got hacked by the Russians and replaced the TP with sandpaper. How did it get sandpaper? They hacked my Alexa to order it. You're right. You are in a good position.
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That should be "ad nauseam". Type I, like "puella".
There's pretentious fucks and ignorant fucks. Try to avoid being both at the same time.
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I just hook up an Intel NUC running CentOS to a display and an AVR or stereo amplifier in each room.
I'm not a fan of those all-in-one systems that couple the speakers to the receiver with built-in streaming applications.
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Cool story. Do you also ask it to tell you the weather, read you your calendar, order things for you online, set timers and reminders, add items to your shopping list...?
If not then you bought a very different product for very different reasons. errr... Congratulations?
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That's the point: I have purposefully not wrapped my life up with Cloud this and Smart that, because I've been in the tech business long enough to know that shit breaks, and the more reliant you are on others, the more your life is at risk when the shit *does* break.
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That's the point: I have purposefully not wrapped my life up with
That's my point. No one cares. But please keep giving us a list of things you don't do, or don't own.
You Been in the business too long guys are like the vegans of the IT world:
Q: "How can you spot a vegan?"
A: "You don't need to. They'll run up and tell you about it."
Meaning of life (Score:1, Funny)
"Hey, Google. What's 42 divided by zero?"
My guess is a certificate error (Score:2)
Expiry or change of key or cert or something along those lines.
Causing ET to be unable to call home.
Hey, dummies (Score:1)
How about listening to music on speakers? Like, a stiff cone, a voice coil, a large permanent magnet in an enclosure?
Why does it need to be connected to massive computing resources over which you have no control?
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I have found that a speaker such as you have explained doesn't make much sound unless we put a couple of wires next to some sort of device that converts, physical bumps/magnetic charges, or optical refraction's into electrical charges of various levels.
I would like to bring up how much money we paid for in them olden days for physical media. Often pay 20 bucks for album for that one song we wanted. Or the cost of a song for just a blank media.
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Sure, I use it for fast downloading of popular open source software.
Must music isn't licensed for torrent downloads, so I don't do so. I have friends and family who are professional musicians. Even if they get pennies per sale, the fact that the purchase is tracked helps them get more notice, more notice gives them more gigs, the live performance gigs is where the real money is.
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Because I can listen to nearly every song ever made in any room in my house.
Confirmed; Happened to me this morning (Score:3)
My Google Home is used, among other things, as my alarm clock.
This morning, the alarm went off as normal, but after about the third tone it said "Sorry, something went wrong..."
Every attempt to activate it after that produced the same thing.
I even reset it. It would then respond, but when I asked it to play the news or music it went back to the "something went wrong" BS.
Figured I would troubleshoot when I got home today. Interesting to know that I am not the only one.
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I was having trouble casting my phone display to my ChromeCast last night -- I kept getting disconnected after a few seconds. I never got the "Something went wrong" message, though.
They not down! (Score:2)
They are miffed, because Alexa said something about them.
Washington Post (Score:3)
Of course, the WaPo would report this!
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Yeah. Didn't realize what your point was until I figured out the central person involved. A quick google shows a only one other site picking this up.
Found this in my surfing and thought I'd regurgitate it for my amusement: from 2017, "Google admits its new smart speaker was eavesdropping on users".
Anyways, as always, I offer my condolences to those with first world problems.
halp me (Score:1)
can't open my front door
It was to be expected but... (Score:4, Insightful)
But as someone that contemplated (past tense) getting a Chromecast I am still surprised the damn thing can't stream from laptop or phone to the TV without accessing Google.
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Firmware signing is a white middle-class male construct designed to ... umm .. do something horrible and mean to LGBTQWERTYs and ethnics.
Google have much more important things to do, like designing culturally neutral symbols for the 97 different kinds of bathrooms they have.
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I think it can.
Most casting is actually loading a mini app onto the device which then streams the feed directly though. When it screen casts the performance is much worse.
Why Chromecast? (Score:5, Insightful)
I understand that internet-of-shit things like Google Home cannot work when the server end which does the actual speech rec is down. That's why no one sane buys such crap after Nest. And whoever still buys it deserves anything he gets.
However, Chromecast ist a doodad for my TV so my Android Smartphone or Chrome browser can push whatever is on their screen to my big TV, right? This is a cheapo 5cent ARM CPU with 500MB of RAM and a wireless adapter. Basically a small step up from a ESP8266. Why would this need an Internet connection to a mothership? No speech rec or similar. What for? It's by definition in my LAN/WLAN only. Can someone explain this to someone else who owns neither a chromecast nor a spying microphone?
Re:Why Chromecast? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yes. That is the primary purpose. Any technical reason is simply a justification for data munching^W^W enhancing the user experience.
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When you "cast" from Netflix to Chromecast, your Chromecast streams from Netflix and not the device that initiated it.
Also, it's possible that the firmware update broke the LAN connection in some way. This may require manually re-flashing every last Google Home and Chromecast device.
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> When you "cast" from Netflix to Chromecast, your Chromecast streams from Netflix and not the device that initiated it.
But before you are even allowed to start the netflix app on the CC it does a lot of different checks to verify that you are connected to the internet. Probably one of the servers they try to contact to do this has some problems.
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Google-over-Slack (Score:3)
Wait a minute... Slack was offline this morning too. Does this mean Google Home is using Slack as its transport layer?
Frankly, I'm not sure if I'm joking here.
Silence, at last! (Score:2)
Can you hear me now? (Score:2)
They better get it fixed soon or the backlog of stalker "telemetry" being queued up for delivery will lead to the congestive collapse of the Internet.