Google apologises for overnight Nest security camera outage

Google has apologised to Nest owners after an outage knocked some security cameras offline overnight.

People across the world began tweeting about the issue on Monday at about 8pm and devices were unable to record video and show live streams well into Tuesday.

Nest Cam, Nest Cam IQ Indoor, Nest Cam IQ Outdoor, Nest Hello Doorbell and the Nest Hub Max smart display were reportedly affected.

Rishi Chandra, Google’s vice president for Nest, said the problem happened because of “a scheduled storage server software update that didn’t go as intended”.

“You depend on Nest cameras to keep an eye on your home and the people in it, so of course it’s frustrating when you can’t,” he said. “For that, please accept my apology.”

The outage means affected devices will not have collected any video history.

A fix was later rolled out, though the issue was not declared as fully resolved on Nest’s Status page until about 2pm on Tuesday.

Mr Chandra said technicians are still investigating why the issue went on for so long, adding: “Whenever something like this occurs, we carefully look across our systems to figure out how to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

“At Nest we’re committed to building products that give you the help you need. I apologise for not meeting those expectations today.”

Nest was acquired by Google in January 2014.