Google Home outage breaks app Settings, Activity feed (Update: Restored)

Update, October 4, 2024 (05:58 PM ET): We’ve still yet to hear back from Google about what may have caused this glitch to half-break the Home app, but as of this evening the Activity feed and Settings page are once again working properly.

Original article, October 4, 2024 (03:41 PM ET): A nice smart home is awesome once you’ve got it all set up and configured — all the routines you’ll need created, all the automations defined, and all your devices behaving as they should. But it can also seem a bit like a house of cards, and it often only takes one weak link there for the whole system to start feeling janky and unresponsive. Right now Google Home is experiencing somewhat of a service interruption, and while it’s not quite to the point where we can’t turn our lights on, it’s nonetheless pretty annoying.

Open up the Google Home on your phone right now, and things should look pretty normal at first — you can still check on devices, control your Google Wifi, use your lights, and run routines. But keep working your way across the screens on the app’s bottom nav bar, and you’ll start running into trouble.

For starters, the Activity feed is just completely broken, as spotted by the team at 9to5Google. While that’s really just a minor annoyance, the app’s also suffering from a more functional outage, as the Settings screen is also utterly inaccessible at the moment.

If you were in the middle of configuring your smart home, the lack of Settings access is going to be a problem, absolutely. But for the moment, we’re just happy that this outage isn’t affecting more of the Home app, and we can largely keep on using our connected devices like normal.

We’ve reached out to Google to see if the company has any news about what’s going wrong here or advice on how to get Home up to full working order again, and will update you if and when we hear anything.