Google Home and Chromecast outage hits millions of users worldwide

Google devices and apps have experienced serious outages that lasted for more than 12 hours and affected millions of users. The issue affected Google Home and Google Home Mini – speakers that respond to voice commands – as well as Chromecast – a device that plugs into a television and allows people to watch video content. Users were angry at both the length of the outage and the lack of information from Google about it, once it had been identified. Google has not given a reason why these devices went down, only apologising for the service problems and identifying a fix for the issues. The bug meant that when some Google Home owners asked a question of their speaker, it responded: "There was a glitch, try again in a few seconds." If they tried to reset the device, it would sometimes fail to reboot.