No control of Things - SmartThings Classic (13 September 2018)

I left for awhile hoping it was fixed…Nope.

na02-useast 1

I’m in central Iowa.

I am having the same problem. I reboot the hub from no power (no batteries, either). Runs normally for 3-5 minutes. After that it will control things but not update status (for about 30 minutes). After 30 minutes it won’t control anything. However, if I go to a device and operate it locally (like a light switch), it reports the status of the device correctly.

Most of my IP/Cloud stuff doesn’t work (like WEMO, for example), but the weather tile does!

Oddly enough, I have one automation that works. Nothing else in the whole hub, however.

rebooting the hub doesn’t help when there is a platform outage
https://status.smartthings.com/

Rebooting the hub and doing a z-wave repair is a temporary solution for about an hour.

Hubs caught up in this issue appears to be stuck in a loop. When stuck in this loop some devices are cannot be controlled (esp locks and switches). Infact SmartLocks will show the status as unknown after a while for these locks.

A side effect of the loop is that the remote reboot command from the IDE may not work (you can verify by looking at the hub log events), only a physical restart seems to helps. Hopefully when the root issue in the platform is fixed the hub will stop the loop and everything should return to normal.

Rebooting seems to help me. I get functionality for a few minutes before everything goes dark again. That’s useful if I have to check the status of a door lock or something.

I guess that anything that’s so bad that it can be taken down for 24 hours indicates to me that there is a critical flaw in the way that they handle automation. Whatever the reason, I don’t think that customer experience or reliability are the priorities.

It’s a move that a lot of companies are making. Why sell you a box, one-time, when they can sell a service platform that is a recurring revenue stream? The hubs are little more than dumb radio interfaces with some logging and communication but very little on-board logic processing. Even at their current price, it’s a massive profit margin which is why even the V3 hub is actually a technical downgrade over V2. Doesn’t need much horsepower, and additional revenue in accessories and an ecosystem of buying Samsung’s “connected” products for interoperability.

Don’t know about you all, but I’m back business. 9/14/2018 7:20pm US/Central

Thanks to whomever fixed it !!

Just gotta plug transformers back in…

I’ve been fine this whole time (was gone last night and not home until 6pm today, but got no notifications of any kind) and at 8:20 Eastern my hub dropped and has not been back yet. so when you came back on LowOverhead, I dropped off!

I have the new SmartThings WiFi and the WiFi is fine, meshing away and no issues there but the SmartThings side is totally down. This is my first outage and I’m new to SmartThings and I’m already thinking I need to switch ecosystems so this does not happen. I have time to return my set yet…

EDIT - Came back on at 9:54 PM Eastern time.

I’ve found ST to be reasonably reliable for a consumer grade product in this price point but it has never approached guranteed reliability for me.

Everything I have set up has a manual backup that we have had to use on several occasions over the past few years. If you need that kind of reliability you might want to look at a platform that has all local execution.

Just my thoughts…

Yeah, I will have to look at some backup options myself. My smart bulbs worked at least after flipping them off and on so they have a default it seems at least. I’m purchasing locks next so I’ll be sure to skip anything without a keypad for manual entry just in case.

As a note the SmartThings WiFi is actually a really good mesh router and I’m quite pleased with it and the Plume management. It’s worth keeping just for the WiFi but I was hoping for good hub reliability too. I do wish there was local ability at some basic level when the connections went down.

I have better reliability out of the Windows 95 machine still running production equipment at work. Seriously. (Man I hate that it is still needed though )

We still had some really old software running on AS400 when I quit working. I think this dated back to the early 80’s. Nothing surprises me.

In all honesty, I’ve had pretty good luck with ST. For me, I’ve only had a handful of serious outages since I started this adventure almost 4 years ago. I’m still running a V1 hub so nothing is local for me. Once I can finally use the new app (the only thing I still need is a DTH for the Hampton Bay Fan Controller), I will upgrade the hub, move to the new app, and I think I can set up most things to run locally. Through creative rule making, I have 99% of the house running in Smart Lighting. That still won’t help with the minor app or Google Home when the cloud is down but I try and have the “house” know what we need and just do it without much interaction on our part.

To me, the outages seem to run in streaks. When they happen it seems like it’s quite a few. Then the platform becomes reliable for months and months. This migration has definitely added some instability. I’ll be glad when it’s done.

Indeed.

Historically, the platform has never been reliable for “months and months.” There’s been at least one significant outage each month for every month in the last 20 or so, except, I think, for January 2017.

But it’s possible you were not at home during the time when there were problems, or your local smart lighting rules may not have been affected.

I think the impression of waves comes more from the fact that when they issue a platform upgrade that has a problem, they will tend to push out a fix pretty quickly, and then that fix usually needs another fix. :wink:

http://thingsthataresmart.wiki/index.php?title=Bug:_First_Reports

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This is true. Not every outage effects everyone the same. For me, I’ve gone months and months without noticing a single problem. I have seen as many glitches in my ISP’s or the power company here in Florida. I guess a lot has to do with expectations. The short lived issues are inconvenient but not really a big deal, IMO. The ones that last for an extended period of time can be very annoying and really affect the WAF. Fortunately, for me, there have been very few serious outages. I don’t rely on the system as you do though, JD. For me it’s strictly to make life easier. For you, it’s to make life livable.

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Can someone point me to the right place to report an issue? Starting Friday, September 14, nothing seems to be working right. My lighting automation, thermostat automation, and security automation either will not work at all, or is very sporadic. I tried a lot to resolve the issue Friday before finding out there was an actual outage. After countless attempts today as well, I still don’t have everything working. (was working great for almost a year). I see the status is that the outage was fixed, but not for me.

Thanks

https://support.smartthings.com

Thanks. Thought maybe there was a more direct reporting means with regards to the outages.

1-800-SAMSUNG

You can secure your place in the queue and they will call you back. They have always called me back within the hour.
My experience is that this has been much faster than using email.

Thanks. I’ll probably have to call since it’s been 2 days and I’ve yet to get a reply to my email.

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The last time I used email I think it was 4 days to get a response.