I woke up at 7AM yesterday and discovered that two of my Nest cameras were showing as offline. After hours of troubleshooting and hard resetting the cameras to get them working again, I realized the problem was a peculiar issue on Google’s end. Hundreds of Nest Cam owners have reported their cameras showing as offline over the past week or so, but Google hasn’t notified owners or even posted the issue on its Nest service status page.
Reddit users in the UK started reporting Nest Cam outages yesterday with similar reports on Google’s own support forums. Twitter is littered with complaints about offline Nest Cams. 9to5Google even reported on the issues earlier this month, but over the past day the problem has affected a lot more Nest Cam owners.
Most of the reports are from the UK or countries across Europe, but all mention that the Google Home app shows the cameras as offline when they’re actually still able to record events. Both of my cameras wouldn’t let me view a live feed, but would happily record me trying to fix them. Hard resetting the cameras back to factory settings allowed me to get them fully working again and some Nest Cam users have simply had the cameras spring back to life hours later.
Google appears to be aware of the ongoing issues as the company’s Twitter support account acknowledged the problem earlier this month. Strangely, Google has failed to update its own Nest support site to let owners know about the “offline” Nest Cam problem. After I reset my cameras I noticed the issue reappear briefly last night, and others are still waiting for their own Nest Cam devices to show as online in Google Home.