Google on Monday said that it has addressed a relatively widespread outage of its Google Home units that weren’t responding to voice requests. Several users who took to the company’s Product Forums confirmed as much, with one noting that the Alphabet-owned tech giant rolled out a patch over the weekend that reportedly eliminated all issues which started manifesting themselves earlier this month. The problem essentially disabled the Google Assistant’s support for voice commands, with the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) companions answering every “OK Google” query with “something went wrong,” urging users to “try again in a few seconds.” The problem persisted for at least two days until it was fixed, with owners of Google’s Internet of Things (IoT) device experiencing various failure rates during the outage period.
While the Mountain View, California-based company stated that the issue causing the outage has now been resolved, it has yet to clarify on the matter and it’s currently unclear whether the firm will opt to explain what caused the problems in the first place. In light of the fact that only Google Home owners were affected by the outage — with the smartphone version of the Google Assistant working in a reliable manner in the last several days — the cause of the ordeal was likely directly related to the software running on the connected speaker. One Google took to the firm’s Product Forums earlier today to apologize for the inconvenience and thank the company’s customers for their patience. While the issue should now be fixed “for everyone,” those who are still having trouble communicating with the Google Home variant of the Google Assistant are encouraged to reboot the device by physically unplugging it and plugging it back in after around a minute, the company said.
If none of that helps and your Google Home unit is still telling you that something isn’t right when you try communicating with it, consider sending feedback to its developers by launching the Google Home app, tapping the hamburger menu, navigating to the “Help & feedback” section, and then selecting the “Submit Feedback Report” option on the following screen. Being an important part of the company’s product strategy, the tech giant will likely be hard at work ensuring that another major Google Home outage never happens again.