Sincerest apologies for any Wi-Fi Issues — February 23rd - sorry from Google
WiFi Device Just Factory Reset on It's Own - Google forums thread
Primary onhub flashing blue self one of many Reddit threads on the topic
My Google Wifi just factory reset itself without my intervention another ressit thread, this one from the GoogleWifi subreddit.

Whatever the cause of the outage, this is a black-eye for Google and Cloud managed/controlled routers and devices. Maybe now is a good time to pickup some unwanted Google/OnHub routers

I'm guessing this is related to the fact that I had to sign into my Google account on a couple of devices today ? (my iPhone Gmail IMAP and my MacBook Gmail IMAP)

Yeah, I like to control my devices...

Yeesh.

-jk

Yikes! That is NOT a good look.

I didn't have any problems with my accounts or OnHub. Dan?

One of my Google WiFi boxes died in mid-stream while we were watching Netflix, reverting to the 'factory reset' state. I re-paired it and was up and running again in 5 minutes. The other two Google WiFi boxes were unharmed.

But yeah, this was somehow caused by a hiccup in Google's Account managing infrastructure for some as-yet unspecified reason.

That's bizarre that it only happened to one of your boxes.

I've installed OnHubs for two of my clients, and I just found out that one of them reverted to factory defaults, so I'll be heading out there to fix it. Fortunately their main desktop was hard wired, but their printer has been knocked off because I put it on a static IP and the subnet changed. It's weird, but for some reason the TP-Link OnHubs default to a subnet in the 80 range. This one was on 84, mine was originally 86. I wonder why they did that...

A word for and against the OnHub/Google WiFi:

First, against:

Dan, did you notice that Google chose a subnet for you? As far as I can tell, they force you to use a subnet of their choosing, usually 192.168.86.1. I don't see a way to change that. It's not the end of the world but it's weird.

Second, a word for the product:

The advantage of a connected router is that it'll get updates automatically. These updates are usually security-related, but sometimes they're feature upgrades.

When I first purchased the OnHub, it was to replace my 802.11n UniFi access points. I wanted 802.11ac, and I was impressed that the Onhub actually gave me better coverage than my UniFi APs (they were the lite version, though). One thing I didn't know, though, was that the OnHub didn't support NAT loopback. This isn't a problem for most people, but I have a few things that need this, most importantly my IP camera that I use as a baby monitor. Without NAT loopback, I had to program our phones with two cameras, one with an internal address and one with my DDNS address, and we would switch back and forth depending on whether we were at home or not.

Well, yesterday I opened up the camera app and forgot that I was still looking at the "remote" camera while on my own WiFi, and was surprised to see that it worked! I looked it up and sure enough, Google had added NAT loopback as a feature at some point! It seems minor, but it save a lot of annoyance for us.

A router shouldn't need to be "connected" in the Google OnHub sense of the word "connected" to get firmware updates. I have an ordinary Belkin wifi router that self-updates its own firmware automatically. You don't need the router to be connected to a managed account infrastructure for that, it just downloads the latest firmware from the web site and applies it.

Though I understand that such an approach has its own risks, it's not as bad as what happened to OnHub. According to this article, the Google OhHub outage was due to a bug in their back end account authorization engine, which failed the login authorization into the Google account, thus making the routers go down.

That's quite fucked up. I want my router to be a piece of standalone hardware which doesn't require authorization with a third party company to function.

There are other places where I'll accept that kind of thing. I buy a subscription to a cable-modem service provider, and so I expect that my cable router should have to authenticate with the cable company. I buy a service to Playstation Network to take advantage of their online cloud savegame file storage, so I expect to have to authenticate my playstation console with PSN. But wow, my Wifi router is *mine*, it shouldn't have to authenticate with Google in order to function.

Yup, Google takes this level of control out of your hands. At least there was an "advanced" setting in there so I could direct port 22 to my desktop, allowing me to ssh in from the outside. Nothing else I do requires anything beyond the standard NAT functionality.

An amusing related thought: my Nexus 5X bit the dust yesterday. Some sort of common "bootloop" error that results from a hardware failure. Anyway, I originally paid for the extended warranty, so I ponied up $70 and a new phone should be arriving today (although it's nearly 10pm and no delivery truck yet). Well, without my phone, I cannot administrate my network. Everything is built around the phone app. I've got so damn many apps for all the things that reinstalling everything on a new phone seems to be about as much fun as changing your credit number when it's being used for auto-pay on a zillion web sites.

Yeah, that's as much as I need as well. I have a few port forwarding rules set up and at least that's really easy to do. It's still weird that they decide your subnet for you.


That's something I hope will get changed. I've only set up the OnHub for two clients, and decided to stop doing so. Mostly, it's annoying to ask a client to hand over their phone while I set things up, and then I have to ask them for it on each subsequent visit. I'd much rather go through a browser from my own laptop.

Eero gets around this a little by having installer accounts where you can set the system up on your own phone and then sort of transfer it over to a client.