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Google apologizes for Google Home outage in mass email

The company says it "found a glitch with one of our backend systems," but didn't share any additional details.

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Abrar Al-Heeti
abrar-al-heeti2
Abrar Al-Heeti Video producer / CNET
Abrar Al-Heeti is a video host and producer for CNET, with an interest in internet trends, entertainment, pop culture and digital accessibility. Before joining the video team, she was a writer for CNET's culture team. She graduated with bachelor's and master's degrees in journalism from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Though Illinois is home, she now loves San Francisco -- steep inclines and all.
Expertise Abrar has spent her career at CNET breaking down the latest trends on TikTok, Twitter and Instagram, while also reporting on diversity and inclusion initiatives in Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Credentials Named a Tech Media Trailblazer by the Consumer Technology Association in 2019, a winner of SPJ NorCal's Excellence in Journalism Awards in 2022 and has twice been a finalist in the LA Press Club's National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards.
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Google is sorry for its smart-speaker outage.

 Josh Miller/CNET

Google is sorry for the technical difficulties you may have experienced with Google Home on Wednesday.

The company's vice president of Home products, Rishi Chandra, sent an email Thursday apologizing for the smart-speaker outage, saying Google "found a glitch with one of our backend systems and spent the day working hard to get everyone back up and running."

You may have noticed a problem with your
Google Home yesterday morning. We found a glitch
with one of our backend systems and spent the day
working hard to get everyone back up and running.
It's frustrating when technology doesn't work the
way it should, especially when you're depending on
it. We're sorry that this happened.

There's a fix rolling out to all Google Home devices
now. If you're still having trouble, let us know here.

Thanks for sticking with us.

- rishi, on behalf of the Google Home team

The outage, which appeared to be worldwide and also affected Chromecast streaming sticks, began early Wednesday morning. Google told CNET that afternoon that it'd identified a fix, which would begin rolling out automatically over the next several hours. 

On Thursday, the company told CNET "the problem was caused by an issue with one of the backend systems that supports Google Home and Chromecast " but declined to share additional details.