Why is SmartThings degraded or offline almost every day now in the US?

General Discussion
#1

What is the deal with SmartThings being degraded or offline almost every day for the past few months? Their status page is a joke since it does not list the true number of outages. I have lights staying on, flags not getting set, and errors from Google Assistant telling me it could not reach SmartThings almost every day. There is no hardware to be had in the US due to the mishandled outsourcing. Is SmartThings on its way out of business? They have the ability to keep systems online, but they choose to not put in the proper redundancy. Is our data not that valuable to them anymore?

Not pleased with their lack of concern for their constant outages, nor with their lack of transparency on the real number of outages.

-S1930

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#2

rebranded hardware from aeotec should start appearing within a few weeks or at least, that is the word for the hub.

as for the degraded or offline issues you are seeing every day… i am not seeing those types of consistent issues. have you opened a ticket with ST support?

#3

Me neither. It has all been working fine for me lately.
EWeLink integration has been a plus.

#4

which hub do you have? many v1 hub owners have been reporting on-going issues since fall 2020.

#5

I am in the NE USA and I am NOT having any issues.

#6

Midwest good for a week.

#7

I have a US V3 Hub. I see nothing being blocked in either my primary or secondary PiHoles, TCP and UDP captures show no blocked traffic at the firewall, no changes on the network, wireless firewalls not blocking traffic, no blocks for the smartthings hub showing up. I am at a loss as to why control goes offline and back online randomly every few days or sometimes every day for a few minutes or hours. Around 50 other IoT devices having no issues, including the intercepted and redirected (DNAT) 8.8.8.8 DNS requests from Google IoT devices.

#8

I have been testing all day since I am tired of having these issues. Early results indicate it may be something with some virtual switches. Control works fine until I try to turn on or off a virtual switch. Hub then stops responding and shows offline in the IDE (and new app). Maybe a corrupted virtual switch - I am not sure yet. It comes back online on its own (the hub, that is). I’ll have to delete one of these VS and see if that fixes things.

#9

Forgot to mention that five of my friends here in the Midwest also have SmartThings devices going offline several times a week. Not sure if they have the same issues if SmartThings is really online.

#10

There was a period in the summer of 2020 where those with pi-holes were experiencing issues with the ST app. Note: it was only the app and not the hub. Always possible with all the changes taking place on the backend that issues could be flaring up again on pi-holes.

back then… whitelisting usage.trackjs.com and in some cases smartthings.com resolved those issues. But it could be something completely different and unrelated. who knows! I doubt whitelisting would resolve your current situation.

hope you figure it out… keep us informed

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#11

same ISP? …

#12

Piholes don’t show any blocks for SmartThings, but I had the Hub bypass the Piholes anyways. No change. Devices work, then stop working, the work later or after a Hub reboot. The issues started when SmartThings backed out their Winter upgrade due to an issue and then resumed the upgrade a few days later.

I am still testing to see what is happening, but It really looks like the hub goes offline. Maybe the hub is dying and having CPU or other issues. Its temp is okay (not that those get hot).

#13

Different ISPs. Several of us have 1 Gbps Google Fiber and others have different ISPs. I even have Google Fi on a secondary WAN interface for cellular connections when Google goes down. Not sure if the issue is happening on Google Fi, though. I don’t stay on that connection very long.

#14

By the way, thanks for the replies to those who confirmed their hub online status.

#15

Yes, I opened a ticket. They asked me to reboot for step one. Reasonable first step. I’ll work with them as I do my own (faster paced) testing and we’ll see what we come up with.

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#16

Just a hopefully helpful shot in the dark. Based on my experience over the years with computers and electronics. I’ve always been a big fan of having any computer or router or hub plugged into a UPS as filter for electrical fluctuations. I have a V3 hub at work and a V3 hub at home. I have noticed that having them plugged into a UPS, and taking them off the ethernet cable made them the most stable. Crazy , because I always picked hardwired over WIFI for anything.

#17

Good observation. I can see if my UPS had degraded or if the Furman PST-8 is causing issues.

One thing I did find is that most of my virtual switches are corrupted. When turning on or off a VS, the app hangs and so does the hub. I have to either reboot the hub or wait for it to recover, which sometimes takes 10 minutes or so. I have started deleting the virtual switches and creating new ones. All the new ones work perfectly. This may be a side effect of the wonky upgrade last fall that SmartThings pushed out, then stopped, then pushed out again, since that is when this started and some of my rules stopped working (that had virtual switches). Ironically, many of the SmartThings officially announced outages match my outages that didn’t recover when they said they had. That was probably due to my VSs.

Things are better now that most of my VSs are deleted and recreated, but it is not 100% solid. Of course, I still have some more VSs to delete/rebuild.

Thanks,
S1930

#18

Update: My system has been stable since deleting and recreating most of the virtual switches. I converted most of them to simulated switches while I was doing the work. I believe there were three virtual switches that became corrupted in the hub and caused the outages that mimicked the frequent smartthings outages at the end of last year.

Of course, the SmartThings outage from last week (2/11) doesn’t help diagnose my local hub issues.

-S1930

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