Has your home Wi-Fi router started dropping a lot lately? Do you have a Google Home smart speaker, or a Chromecast device on your home network?
It's not coincidental. These Google products have a bug in them that's flooding some home routers with data, causing their memories to fill up and then stop working temporarily, or in some cases crash. The only fix is a reboot.
9to5Google reports that networking hardware manufacturer TP-Link was the first to to go public with news of the issue, though the problem affects other router manufacturers, too.
What's going on? The short answer is that, when Home and Chromecast devices wake from sleep mode, they blast a slew of packets onto the Wi-Fi network. The longer they've been sleeping, the more intense the blast will be.
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For those craving the technical details, here's the long answer from TP-Link:
"From what we have gathered so far, the issue appears to be related to some recent releases of Android OS and Google Apps. This issue stems from these devices' "Cast" feature, which sends MDNS multicast discovery packets in order to keep a live connection with Google products such as Google Home. These packets normally sent in a 20-second interval. However, we have discovered that the devices will sometimes broadcast a large amount of these packets at a very high speed in a short amount of time. This occurs when the device is awakened from the "sleep mode", and could exceed more than 100,000 packets in a short amount of time. The longer your device is in "sleep", the larger this packet burst will be. This issue may eventually cause some of router's primary features to shut down – including wireless connectivity."
The issue appears to affect ASUS, Linksys, Netgear, Synology and TP-Link routers. TP-Link has released new firmware to fix it, as has Linksys. Netgear has released a beta version of a firmware fix but only for its mesh-networking Orbi routers.
If you don't have any Google Home or Chromecast products in your home, you don't have to worry about this. But if you do, keep an eye on your router maker's support website for news on a patch.
Google confirmed to 9to5Google that there's an issue and it's working on its own fix.
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