Tech is great. I love tech. Really, I do. I come home each night to my apartment, where I enjoy casting Netflix shows from my laptop to my television and telling my Amazon Echo to set a timer while my tea steeps. But sometimes it seems like maybe — just maybe — some things don’t need to be technologically optimized. Like turning on your air conditioner.
Over the weekend, a Google Cloud outage meant some users were unable to control certain smart-home products, including — you guessed it — air conditioning.
Among the smart-home problems caused by Google’s servers going down:
• One user reporting that he couldn’t turn on his A/C because the Nest app was down.
(As he acknowledges, he could have used his house’s manual thermostat — except that it was located behind a mounted TV.)
• Another user saying he couldn’t use his Nest cameras as baby monitors:
• That wasn’t all: “Can’t use my Nest lock to let guests into my house,” one user wrote on Y Combinator, spotted by Zeynep Tufekci.
“We are experiencing high levels of network congestion in the eastern USA, affecting multiple services in Google Cloud, GSuite, and YouTube. Users may see slow performance or intermittent errors. We believe we have identified the root cause of the congestion and expect to return to a normal service shortly,” the company said in a statement to TechCrunch. The outage also impacted Gmail and YouTube, but things seem to be back to normal as of Monday.
