Google Outage Reignites Worries About Smart Home Without Backups
What happens when your lights are connected to your smart speaker.
An error message on the Gmail.com homepage in London on Dec. 14.
Photographer: Hollie Adams/BloombergHi, it's Mark Bergen. Early Monday morning, Joe Brown walked into his daughter's room and delivered his usual greeting, "Hey, Google, turn on the lights." He owns a Google smart speaker that lets him control the lights with his voice, and which, "when you're holding a kid with a bottle or a diaper full of crap, is usually pretty good," he said.
But that morning, nothing happened. With the lights out, Brown grabbed a lantern. Cradling his daughter in one hand and his phone in the other, he tweeted: "I’m sitting here in the dark in my toddler’s room because the light is controlled by @Google Home. Rethinking... a lot right now."