Good news for annoyed Chromecast owners whose devices haven’t been working this week: Google is rolling out a fix for affected devices. Second-generation Chromecasts have been non functional since last weekend, due to an issue with an expired authentication certificate authority, but the fix should arrive for users over the next few days.
Google confirmed the fix in a post on its Nest forums, writing that: “We have started to roll out a fix for the problem with Chromecast (2nd gen) and Chromecast Audio devices, which will be completed over the next few days. Your device must be connected to receive the update.”
The company also confirmed to The Register that users simply need to leave their devices powered on and connected to the internet, and they will automatically be updated.
As the problem was caused by an expired certificate authority, the new firmware update moves over to a new Google-owned certificate authority that won’t expire until 2045. That means there won’t be a repeat of this problem for the next twenty years, which will come as a relief.
When the issue first occurred, users saw an error message saying that the device was untrusted and had outdated firmware, leading many to assume that their Chromecasts were no longer supported by Google and were being bricked. Happily for those users, that isn’t the case and they should be able to continue to use their devices again soon.
However, there is on ongoing problem regarding factory resets. Google warned users not to try to fix the issue by performing a factory reset, as this caused further problems. Users who have factory reset their devices will have to wait some more time for another fix, Google wrote on the Nest forums: “If you performed a factory reset during initial troubleshooting, you may still be experiencing an issue where you cannot re-setup your device. We are working to resolve this as soon as possible. Please continue to check the Community page here for updates and next steps.”
