Getting frustrated with the Outages again

Mine just came back up.

Iā€™m up as wellā€¦

Yepā€¦ Iā€™m back up tooā€¦ EDIT: Or not. Now I canā€™t go downstairs without tripping my alarm. REALLY not cool.

Iā€™m hoping we can discuss this Client App access outage, as well as SmartApp performance / outages at the next Developer Office Hours conference call, please @mager @Ben.

2 Likes

good itā€™s working, I just got my hub tonight and was bummed when I couldnā€™t get it to set up

edit: spoke to soon oh well I guess Iā€™ll give up for the night

apps are busted again :frowning: the status page looks like an xmas tree lol.

My alarm is stuck in ā€œAwayā€ mode, since we canā€™t connect with any device to change status. We had to unplug our siren (otherwise it would still be blaring), and we are getting notifications whenever we open a door. We cannot do anything but unplug our ST devices until this is resolved.

At the very least, a web dashboard I can use to adjust things in an emergency would be nice.

4 Likes

After reading a couple of the other responses, I double checked and mine is back down again as well.

This amount of outages is not acceptable for any network service. ST has a lot of community support that will disappear quickly at this rate. This week has been a mess. People rely on these services. Either their change management or incident management needs some maturity. ST should start to provide root cause analysis for outages of this size. They arenā€™t the only shop in town so transparency would go a long way.

This has not been a good day for Smartthings

1 Like

Iā€™m still having issues as well. Although, tonight is the first Iā€™ve noticed since I got my hub last Wednesday.

Iā€™m a bit worried considering the tone on this thread makes it sound like this happens a lot. And if it happens a lot, maybe I should just give up on this whole thing right now and go a different directionā€¦ :\

It seems most of us SmartThings users are techies. As a kid I used to be fascinated by the systems of model trains, laying track, and sequencing events and today I indulge this hobby with SmartThings.

Being techies,we are tolerant of experimentation and entertain the fun little glitches ā€“ failed software, slow services, outages, faulty configuration, the occasional electrical fire, etc. When I walked in to my home this evening my front door would not unlock and my lights didnā€™t turn on. Fortunately, I had some redundancy ā€“ a spare key and a light switch.

But what would happen if I trusted this system to lock my door when I left the house and it went down ā€“ would it stay open for the world to walk in?

What if it were locked and I couldnā€™t open the door because I had to key ā€“ would I be sleeping in my car?

What if my alarm wouldnā€™t stop blaring because I couldnā€™t shut it off while the service was down? Mine doesnā€™t blare, fortunately.

The fatal flaw with these SmartThings is that they cease to be ā€œsmartā€ when that hub disconnects from the network, and we all know that it is impossible to prevent a device from disconnecting from a network no matter how fast, how reliable, or how many clouds service it.

SmartThings is violating a basic principle ā€“ locally informed decisions USUALLY result in better execution than centrally uniformed arbitrary ones. Entire nations including our own have been founded on this delegation of authority. So, for SmartThings, the hub should have all of the information it needs to respond to an event effectively and it doesnā€™t seem to have that now when the cloud is out. It can use guidance from the central cloud, and it can respond to events only the cloud can originate (e.g. from my roaming cell phone), but it must be able to make its own decisions based on the logic it has even when its connection to the central cloud is down. If it cannot do this, the device is fatally flawed and cannot enter the mainstream. I am willing to put up with this flaw because I find tinkering with SmartThings fun, but I cannot install this product in my motherā€™s house ā€“ sheā€™s going to get the boring ZWave that ADT overcharges for.

Please take this feedback to heart and act accordingly.

10 Likes

My Smartthings hub arrived in the mail todayā€¦ I was eager to set it up, but of course none of it is working today. I wasted a couple of hours troubleshooting, assuming it was my rookie mistakes, before I found the status page.

I was feeling awfully dumb for spending a bunch of money having an alarm system installed in my house a few months ago, but after today, Iā€™m not feeling so dumb anymore.

I might trust Smartthings with my basement lights, and maybe my thermostatā€¦ but Iā€™m going to need some local offline processing and a bunch more courage before I make the full jump.

Joeā€¦ You are so right on the money.

Fortunately, my doors still lock the old fashion way and my alarm system is completely independent of SmartThings. I couldnā€™t sleep at night knowing that there is a possibility (which has already occurred several times) where the hub is left helpless because it cannot connect to the cloud service.

It would be completely unacceptable if my doors didnā€™t lock or unlock on command, or if the security system that protects my home couldnā€™t be counted on as bulletproof. Thereā€™s simply no reason to need (nor require) Internet connectivity to execute these kinds of critical commands. 100% local processing is a must, with the exception of the stuff that requires the Internet as a bridge, such as control from smartphone when away from home. Not having that isnā€™t going to potentially end someoneā€™s life or damage someoneā€™s property, just cause a little inconvenience.

At first the app was extremely slow to load. It defeats the purpose of easily switching on off light with a tap on your phone if you wait 15-20 sec for dashboard to load.

Now the app wonā€™t load at all. With two little toddlers in the house, I cannot afford to have such bloopers (siren blaring) when we arrive home.

Already looking for a different service/hub that could work with z-wave, zigbee hardware and have local processing. any suggestions?

Mine is finally back up. They need to resolve these problems yesterday.

I can connect from my phone now as well.

We will hopefully send out an update about the outages soon but I wanted to take the time to apologize for them. It is super frustrating for us too and there have been a few reasons for them. We have been preparing a huge backend update for the past couple months and it is coming none too soon (as in it will likely start tomorrow) and be completed this week. It should provide much more stability and speed. Hereā€™s to hoping it goes well. More soon.

8 Likes

Big ditto ā€“ (and you can check the records; Iā€™ve been saying this from nearly the very beginning of the Kickstarter campaign in the KS comments):

SmartThings MUST have a cloud independent mode for some substantial set of functions, since a substantial set of Home Automation is CRITICAL.

As a basic and fundamental example: In the current feature-set, persons may become SmartThings customers and perhaps just install various controlled lights (Smart Outlets, Hue, Z-Wave sockets, TCP) ā€¦ with the type of outage experienced today, such customers would be stuck in complete DARKNESS for the duration of the outage (about 1.5 hours). If these outages are more rare than power-grid failures, then perhaps that is acceptable (?). The issue is that in a SmartThings environment there are multiple potential points of failure and that unavoidably adds up to a lower overall uptime (e.g., broadband outage, cloud outage, app failure, hub failure).

Making the hub support local execution of logic (client access, status and control functions for single Things, and simple rules, particularly for alarms based on sensors, etc., ā€¦): a substantial safety point is added (basic redundancy). I personally have a secondary Z-Wave controller (an old GE Remote), and I have a Philips Hue Bridge (which runs, by default, in LAN mode only using their Cloud for offsite access and scene sharing), and I try to ensure all my devices have a manual override button or switch within reach.

Of course, there are competitors entering the Home Automation / Home Security space that have localized redundancy fundamentally built into their architecture (e.g., ALYT, WigWag, ā€¦, availability unknown). This is not news, right? But weā€™d like to see this on the SmartThings roadmap, please?

Not to oversell a competitive product (particularly since it only in pre-sales), but Iā€™m encouraged that the ALYT is based on an Android OS Hub, which can thus host and execute their versions of ā€œSmartAppsā€ as ā€œnormalā€ Android programs. Furthermore, the ALYT hub is designed with 3G connectivity built-in (i.e., redundant cloud access for offsite control and status / alarm reporting).

ā€¦CP.

Thanks, Ben! ā€¦ I look forward to however much detail you can share.

I think most of us are aware of the complexity of the system and thus the inherent risks; but we also like to understand where the points of failure have been as specifically as possible and see how ST evolves beyond these (-- in advance, via a product roadmapā€¦?)!