Samsung Electronics’ smart home platform SmartThings is finally back online, after a frustrating outage in North America. The downtime began on Monday evening and persisted for almost 24 hours. SmartThings acknowledged the outage within an hour since the first reports surfaced, and has subsequently addressed the root cause of the outage.
SmartThings Outage
At around 7:30 PM GMT on Monday, SmartThings users in North America complained that they were unable to load the SmartThings app to control devices, forcing them to control manually. SmartThings quickly took note of the reported issues and began an investigation. The issue reportedly was in with the SmartThings Cloud. Almost 24 hours later, the company reported that the issues it was encountering with the SmartThings Cloud had been resolved. However, “a small subset” of SmartThings users then continued to struggle to install and edit automation routines on the platform. The company has eventually fixed that particular issue and all US operations are performing as expected now.
Although SmartThings does offer its own range of connected devices, including door and window sensors, water leak monitors, and other gadgets, the root of its popularity has undoubtedly been its role as a centralized hub. It is compatible with a wide variety of networking standards and serves as a central hub for its own range of devices as well as third-party smart home gadgets. When there’s an outage, those gadgets lose the ability to communicate with each other and function as intended. Though most devices can be operated manually, a dead smart home hub can still cause problems for homeowners with automated devices.
The issues have been resolved as of now, but the company isn’t taking any chances and is working on an update for the SmartThings app, while closely monitoring the systems. SmartThings is expected to release a new, completely rebuilt version of the smartphone app very soon.
