SmartThings Outage - Jan 27 2018

Manually rebooted my hub (pulled power) and it came back online.

Manual reboot, back online too

So, itā€™s all your fault! :wink:

1 Like

yeah - next time you can come over to my house to deal with the alarm going off and having to run around the house unplugging sirens and strobes, all while trying to deal with the alarm company calling and the dog freaking out.

Oh yeah and someone telling people how the dev website is ā€œjust going in and outā€¦ā€

Whatever dudeā€¦

Learning curve probably wonā€™t be that steep for me. I just thought for once something might work out of the box. I did for the first month. I know betterā€¦ Smarthings/Samsung has bit more off then they can chewā€¦ Cloud based home automation without local backup WILL NEVER WORK. The cloud breaks to often.

Other people also gave real time updates that IDE was also available at various times during the outage.

Donā€™t shoot the messenger my friend.

If I was to come over, I would rip your sirens and strobes out of your system so that during the next outage you canā€™t complain about sirens and strobes going off and that you canā€™t stop them.

Take your frustrations out on someone else. I was just passing information along as things were happening. :slight_smile:

Itā€™s very, very common. (Though it doesnā€™t make it any less dumb).

Happened at a very large Bank I worked for too.

1 Like

For those that are frustrated, you have every right to be. Personally, for me and others, this now makes 3 times in 27 days of the 2018 new year in which major problems have arose. Straight-line math says we have another 33 outages to look forward to in 2018! Yippee!

All day today pairing multiple Z-Wave ā€œthingsā€ was literally a roll of the dice at the proverbial SmartThings casino. Pairing a ā€œthingā€ feels like the ā€œcrapsā€ table. I had 8 identical switches to pair and each one would hit (pair) at random on Pass or Donā€™t Pass (i.eā€¦ Include, Exclude) with zero consistencyā€¦ i.e. A gamble, which ST is becoming.

Problems like this donā€™t just ā€œhappenā€ on their own unless some higher power (i.e.AWS) goes down, which according to Amazon status was not the case, so this is likely in the ST camp. So, yet again, likely someone at ST deployed sh|tty rushed untested code, which took down parts of the platform. This is becoming par for the ST course.

On the theory above, does anyone know if SmartThings develops under waterfall or Agile?

If Agile, that would explain all this drama. House burns down, floods or you get robbed due to all locks opening on their own , or like another poster mentioned, a garage door was wide open, the Agile development mentality is basically,ā€¦pfffftā€¦ ā€œoh well!!!ā€ā€¦ā€Iterate. Iterate. Iterate!!!ā€ is the rhetoric trained and this developmen method is slowly becoming a cancer for companies and ultimately for us as end users. While Agile is well intentioned, itā€™s poorly executed.

Perhaps someone should start a thread to keep score on # of outages this year? Or even better, in the spirit of lightening the mood, perhaps we should all bet on squares for # number of outages per month and duration. Lol.

Joking aside, either way, this crap is getting old. ST mangemenr needs to solve this both short and long term quickly otherwise once the ā€œnext big thingā€ for a IoT hub comes to bear, the ship will quickly become lighter.

1 Like

I can relate to this one and completely agree.

Companies nowadays seem to neglect housekeeping and vital operational tasks like renewing certificates as everyone is too busy chasing the next thing versus taking care of what is in front of them.

In a recent past job if I didnā€™t remind my good friends in IT to create the CSR to renew certs, literally, very large service platforms would have gone down many times over. Common issue, just like you mention. :slight_smile:

1 Like

Correction - Itā€™s worse than that. There have been 3 Major outages since January 3rd.

SmartThings Outage - 01/03/18
SmartThings Outage - 01/16/18
SmartThings Outage - 01/27/18

So the math calculations get even worse for the rest of the year :slight_smile:

1 Like

Calculations adjusted. We now have another 33 outages to look forward to. :slight_smile:

Now we just need squares to place our bets on when and how long, lol.

1 Like

Or you could just check the existing wiki page in the community ā€“ created wiki on ā€œfirst bug reports.ā€ :wink:

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

4 Likes

Good reference. Thanks and bookmarked. :slight_smile:

2 Likes

Maybe a very dumb noob question: I thought all security was run locally?

It is if you have the new ADT/SmartThings security panel. Thatā€™s one of the best things about that model line.

However, if you have any of the other smartthings hub devices, only a small bit of smart home monitor runs locally. Most of it still runs in the cloud.

https://support.smartthings.com/hc/en-us/articles/209979766-Local-processing

1 Like

TQ, appreciate the insight.

Iā€™ve been in to the Smartthings thing for about a week and did not realize just how dependent this system is on the cloud. Never had these concerns with my +20 year old X10 automation gear!

I have been lurking on here for a year and always thought people were crazy about all of the outages. Well, this one affected me! Are there any locally processed hubs out there that donā€™t depend on the cloud?

I honestly donā€™t think that SmartThings issues are totally because of it being cloud based. Lots of things are cloud based. As one example, my dedicated, monitored security system is cloud based and it is rock solid and has been for years. SmartThings, issue is that itā€™s a poorly implemented cloud based system.

Just my opinion.

3 Likes

Sure, but then you give up other things, mostly the variety of Devices which can be Connected to your system and the ease with which a non programmer can use custom code. And maybe the complexity of rules that are supported. Every system has pluses and minuses, you just have to find the one that best matches your own needs and preferences.

See for example:

There are literally about another 50 threads discussing this so you can also poke around the forum and find some more. But it pretty much comes down to the same issues: Either you pay more, or you accept A simpler system, or you find a system where you will have to do a lot of coding for yourself.

Each of those will be the right answer for some people but thereā€™s no one right answer that suits everyone.
.

1 Like