Today has not been a good day for my smart home, and it points to a major flaw in the SmartThings product.When I walked out to the living area this evening, the motion sensor failed to illuminate the lights. I checked the SmartThings app on my phone. It said my home hub was inactive.The SmartThings status page had a note saying from 18:39 EST saying:Some users may be experiencing issues with Hub Connectivity. SmartThings is investigating and will update accordingly. There was a later note at 21:04 EST saying: Users with inactive v2 Hubs will need to perform a reboot by pushing the button on the back of their Hub in order to get it connected again. Please note that it may take 5-10 minutes after performing a reboot for the Hub to reconnect. We apologize for the inconvenience. This is really bad for a couple reasons. First, if the cloud fails, so too does my house. That's because SmartThings runs its automations in the cloud, not the hub. I knew this was a drawback to the SmartThings platform when I purchased the product. I hoped it would be an infrequent occurence, but it's already happened once in the first month of ownership. I'm nervous. Second -- and this is really bad -- the house didn't recover when the cloud came back. I had to do a manual reset of the device. If I wasn't home at the time, my home (and security systems) would have been offline until I returned. As I get ready for an out of town trip (note to burglars - no I'm not), this is weighing on my mind. I've lost a lot of confidence in the SmartThings platform tonight. The silver lining to this cloud is that SmartThings is standards based. The bulk of my investment is in Z-Wave and Zigbee devices, not the $99 hub. I hope SmartThings gets their act together. But if they don't, I'm ready to cue up an openHAB solution.Dec 14 update: Over the weekend, SmartThings rolled out a priority hotfix for the issue that required a manual reset of the hub.
