Rarely do tech companies apologize for mistakes or issues. The only exception is usually a data breach and even then, it is usually well after the fact. So when Google’s Vice President of Google Home products, Rishi Chandra, sends out an email apologizing for an outage, you tend to take note.
As you may recall, and may have been impacted yourself, there was a wide spread outage of Google Home earlier this week. The email went out to all Google Home customers yesterday, apologizing for the outage and giving a bit of detail on what happened – well, as much as Google is willing to talk about it.
Here is the email that was sent to me on the subject.
Google Home Apology Email
As I reported on the original outage, I was never impacted. My Google Home devices around my home continued to work as normal, as did my two Chromecast devices. So the outage didn’t impact everyone but Google sent the email out to everyone. It is likely that Google couldn’t in a reasonable amount of time determine which customers were impacted and which weren’t so instead of accidentally missing someone, they sent out the blanket email to everyone.
It is good to see Google own the issue and admit the error. It is something doesn’t happen often enough in my opinion and it goes a long way with customer satisfaction.
If you are still having challenges with your Home or Chromecast devices, you may need to reboot them. I put the instructions on how to do this gracefully through the app in the previous article which is linked above.
