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Philips Hue’s second ongoing remote connectivity outage infuriates users

by Savia Lobo on January 4, 2019

A day after Christmas, Philips Hue experienced an outage where customers were experiencing issues creating new accounts, logging in and linking their account to third parties. The company concluded that this was due to “a lot of new activations”.

According to a TechCrunch post, “many people received Hue’s connected lighting products over the holidays and were now trying to set up their smart bulbs and other devices all around the same time. Hue’s servers couldn’t keep up with the demand and weren’t responding to the incoming requests”. This meant that users could not create or log into their MyHue account, or connect their lights to their Amazon Echo or Google Home.

Philips Hue’s Twitter account didn’t make a public announcement about the outage until Dec 26. Instead, the company was only replying to individual users.

We’re currently seeing a lot of new activations which may result in some customers not being able to create a new account, log in, or link their account to third parties. We hope to have this solved soon and like to ask you to try again later. Apologies and happy holidays!
— Philips Hue (@tweethue) December 26, 2018

The company then tweeted that the issue preventing successful account setup and device linking was resolved.

UPDATE. The issue that was preventing successful account setup and device linking appears to be resolved. When you’ve got a moment, we’d love to have you try again. Meanwhile, much gratitude for your patience.
— Philips Hue (@tweethue) December 27, 2018

Almost a week after the company claimed that the issue was resolved, the company tweeted that they were having an issue with remote connectivity (Out of Home, voice commands). The company said that they would resolve the issue soon. However, the local connection via Wi-Fi would not be affected, the company tweeted.

Currently we are having an issue with remote connectivity (Out of Home, voice commands), and we’re working hard to resolve it ASAP. Your local connection via Wi-Fi is not affected by this. We’ll keep you posted!
— Philips Hue (@tweethue) January 3, 2019

One of the users tweeted pointing out that the company chose Twitter to let the users know and not via a notification email.

Ridiculous that the fastest way to find this information is on twitter. If you have a registered account, you should receive a notification via email.
— Jon VanNevel (@bigjonvtpa) January 3, 2019

The company, however, informed the users that this issue will be resolved soon. If not, they could also disconnect their bridge for 30 seconds or try again later.

To know more about this news in detail, head over to Philips Hue’s twitter thread.