There are claims that the outage may have stemmed from an unsuccessful update, but there isn't any firm evidence of this at the moment. One thing's clear: this is bound to be frustrating if you rely heavily on Google's ecosystem to power your smart home.

Update: Google has a fix ready, and has promised to automatically deploy it within six hours (as of roughly 6PM Eastern). If you can't wait, Google recommends restarting your devices to bring them back online. The company also notes that the outage came from a problem with the backend systems that work with both Google Home and Chromecast.