Internet Status — August 18, 2026: Google Home/Nest Outage

Google's Home and Nest smart-home platform suffered a global outage today. Users across multiple regions reported Nest Hub displays and Google Nest/Home speakers failing to respond to voice commands, routines and automations not running, timers failing, and devices stuck on loading screens or returning 'Hmm, something went wrong.' Crowd-sourced reports pointed at Google's cloud backend rather than the devices themselves — roughly 74% of Downdetector complaints cited server connection problems. The incident does not appear on the Google Cloud status dashboard (consumer Home/Nest services aren't tracked there), and Google had not issued a statement at the time of writing, but user reports indicate service is recovering. Coverage: https://phandroid.com/2026/08/18/its-not-just-you-google-home-and-nest-suffers-global-outage-as-users-report-problems/

GitHub has two minor active incidents this morning: intermittent failures loading runner-group and runner-permission pages (monitoring) and an investigation into degraded performance for some services (githubstatus.com). This follows yesterday's larger, now-resolved incident involving Copilot authentication failures and broader service degradation.

Smaller ongoing items: Slack is still working through a narrow issue (since Aug 13) where workspaces with custom data-retention policies have trouble accessing historical messages (slack-status.com). Akamai continues to implement a fix for connection drops in Miami, with no customer impact reported. Twilio shows routine regional SMS carrier degradations (UK, Brazil, French Caribbean). Spectrum shows only scattered, localized user reports — normal background noise, not a network event.

Everything else checked is clear: AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Cloudflare, Fastly, OpenAI, Discord, Atlassian, Vercel, Heroku, DigitalOcean, Stripe, Zoom, and Meta all report normal operations, and there are no signs of BGP, DNS, or undersea-cable problems. Core internet infrastructure is healthy.