Good news for Ecobee customers: Your service is now restored.
Smart home vendor Ecobee had experienced a major server and web site outage for a couple hours Thursday, disrupting services across the country to its mobile apps and products with Alexa and SmartThings integration. Ecobee reported that they were back up and running at about 5 p.m. PT.
The outage was reported by hundreds of users on Twitter and Outage.Report, and confirmed in several Ecobee tweets responding to individual complaints. The outage apparently lasted about two and a half hours and appeared to have been resolved by late afternoon Pacific Time.
“Not able to use Alexa with ecobee and cannot use the app either when I open the app and check connected devices nothing shows up. When I run a ping test on the ecobee it shows it is getting out to the internet,” user David Cruse wrote on Outage.Report.
Ecobee’s tweets repeated what appeared to be a canned response: “We’re busy bees working on a server outage. Your ecobee and settings will continue to work but you may experience difficulty logging in or using the app. We’re working hard to get everything up and running as soon as possible. My apologies for the inconvenience!”
Ecobee’s web site, meanwhile, displayed a message saying “We’re working on some improvements at the moment. Don’t worry, we’ll be back up and running in no time!”
A tech support representative at Ecobee’s Toronto headquarters confirmed the outage. Contacted by phone at about 3:35 pm PT, tech support rep Felipe Torres said the outage had begun about two hours earlier, and was proving difficult to fix. “Typically it doesn’t last that long,” he said. “We can’t access anything right now.”
A SmartThings tweet that also responded to complaints suggested that Ecobee users check for updates on Ecobee’s status page, but the page shed little light on the problem. A post at 6:50 pm ET read, “We’re experiencing an elevated level of errors and are currently looking into the issue.”
Ecobee’s Outage.Report page indicated that users have reported scattered outages over the last few months.
Ecobee is best known for its smart thermostats, which compete with Nest’s. More recently Ecobee has launched its Switch+ smart light switches. The smartphone apps affected by the outage manage Ecobee’s products, and some also have built-in Amazon Alexa support.
Updated at 7:30 p.m. to note that Ecobee’s service is now restored.
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