Reports from Nest Secure customers who are unable to arm/disarm or lock/unlock

This is what the future will bring more of - not some all powerful AI - just a bunch of crap that didn&#x27;t need to be tethered to the cloud that suddenly stops working without much explanation, as the Deal With It dog laughs and dons his sunglasses.<p>Edit: typo

There&#x27;s a Nest system in the house I rent in. It didn&#x27;t work from phone&#x2F;web, so I just walked over to the actual thermostat on the wall, and it worked just fine.<p>AFAIK from reading the Twitters last night, you could still punch the numbers into your home locks and get inside. So the things just took us back a few years in terms of smart phone access, but the core device still works.

Why would they depend on the internet to allow you to control a device at your home? NFC? Bluetooth? Wifi? Ignoring the obvious security problems of these devices being internet-connected, it&#x27;s just a crap design from a usability standpoint. (where &quot;usability&quot; includes &quot;can use it when the internet goes out&quot;)

Please let me quote from Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams:<p>The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.

Title is a bit misleading, as the devices evidently didn’t stop working via physical controls.<p>That said, were they... really not monitoring their service?

On behalf of everybody who had entirely too much fun during internet of shit talks at the ten or so last congresses:<p>If only somebody told us that would happen!

SmartDevices are inherently fragile due orders of magnitude more points of failure. Instead of &quot;Smart&quot; functionality being optional it (due commercial interest) becomes core control circuitry on which the functionality depends.<p>An example(hypothethical) SmartFishtank which dispenses food to fish with pre-programmed schedules and monitors&#x2F;adjust water temperature. Its connected to internet and can be monitored remotely. Users can even upload new feeding schedules. What happens if its hacked? Fish can be boiled, starved or overfed because SmartFishTank has control over the whole device.<p>In another corner there is a electronic fish tank with mechanical feeder that is set to one of 3 feeding modes. The fish tank monitors temperature and acidity, but cannot adjust it and only send a audible alarm or a SMS message. However whatever happens to the electronic components, they cannot harm the fish inside because its purpose is to just receive data.

You&#x27;d think if you could trust anyone with uptime of the most important IOT stuff(locks, thermostat etc) , it would be Google. Yet here we are, smh!<p>I like automating or wiring up my home with connected devices, this outage is making me thing twice.

I get the feeling we have pointless products more often than not these days. All these advances, just to create a speaker that listens to you and helps you shop. And now this, there is going to be a whole lot more e-waste in the coming years because of manufacturer antics like this.

Yikes. I would definitely be re-thinking my home security if I normally use my locks remotely and I was suddenly unable to.<p>A house burglar could effectively use these tweets as push notifications telling them to go rob some smart™ homes in their local rich neighborhoods.

I was considering getting some of these devices but things like this scare the fuck out of me. Let alone if Nest goes away you end up with some useless bricks. Any suggestions for self hosted smart locks?

May be a larger Google problem, I just wanted to stuff a German link [0] into Google translate to post it here, and Google translate gives me a<p>403 Your client does not have permission to get URL &#x2F; from this server. (Client IP address: 84.131.XXX.XXX)<p>(That is a standard German Telekom IP, usually Google only acts up when I do anything funny.)<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17091962" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17091962</a><p>(I got google to translate, still no luck with translate.google.de )

On the one hand, expecting your remote-controlled lock to work <i>all</i> the time (as in 100% uptime) is unfeasible, since it is impossible to achieve 100% uptime. Almost everyone buying a smart lock probably expected it to have 100% uptime though, and I&#x27;m sure they didn&#x27;t read the small print w.r.t. uptime SLAs.<p>On the other hand, it&#x27;s probably no more inconvenient than locking yourself out, something that happens every now and again for anyone. Except you don&#x27;t have yourself to blame, but Nest.

I have had trouble with Nest devices staying on an IP address after the lease expires, messing up the network once that address gets used by someone else. I had to reserve IPs for each one in the end. More than once, I have had a Nest smoke alarm go off for absolutely no reason, in an empty house. It&#x27;s always nice to get an alert on your phone at work telling you your house is on fire. I don&#x27;t think their QA department is the best.

Does anybody know if this has anything to do with GKE? Last night right before I noticed the Nest app was unresponsive, I noticed my entire Kubernetes cluster was randomly brought down. At first I thought it was for some kind of maintenance, but thought it was strange that it wasnt brought down gracefully. I still have no idea what happened.

When I had a landline, I literally never picked it up and had no dial tone. When I had an ADT security system, I never had a single failure with it.<p>Meanwhile I have never regularly used a web service that didn’t have at least one outage.

Our Nestcam has been flickering on and off since about 3:30pm PDT yesterday. I assumed it was something with the wifi, but it looks like it&#x27;s just upstream server issues. I guess that&#x27;s a relief?

Smarthome devices that can&#x27;t function at some level without a cloud service are trash. Do yourself a favor and skip wifi cameras all together, use an IP camera and a NVR.

People unable to unlock their doors? I hope they give a detailed postmortem.

You are the beta-tester.