Google TV went off the air for hours last weekend

Compared to how people got their entertainment 25 years ago, our modern era of streaming just feels so much more civilized. Beyond having access to a greater variety of content than probably any other audience has enjoyed in history, we’re actively in charge of what we’re watching, in a way that feels particularly empowering. But for as far as we’ve come from the days of messing around with rabbit ears to get a weak station to come in, problems still happen, and it looks like Google TV ran into some major issues over the weekend.

In a thread over on the Android TV Reddit sub, user PDPopper shared word of a Google TV outage, ultimately being joined by dozens of voices confirming with their own issues (h/t Johnathan Saunders). Problems look like they first started popping up sometime around Saturday mid-day (Eastern), and we see users reporting the situation resolving by the small hours of Sunday morning.

During that time period, viewers were able to access Google TV services, including both the mobile app and the TV platform. The app basically stopped showing anything at all, while on affected sets, users were still able to stream with third-party apps, but the For you screen no longer worked, and they couldn’t access Google’s Live linear streams.

Some users were able to figure out a work-around to still access their previously purchased media, by way of going through YouTube, which hopefully got them through the afternoon just fine. By Sunday morning, reports had dried up, and it looked like everything was working just like normal.

We’ve reached out to Google to see if we can get any further insight into what happened with this outage, and will update this post to share any statement the company provides.