Your smart home should survive a Google outage; mine didn't, so I built one that does

Published Sep 13, 2026, 8:15 AM EDT I’ve been covering Android since 2023, when I joined Android Police, mostly focusing on AI and everything around Pixel and Galaxy phones. I’ve got a bachelor’s in IT with a major in AI, so I naturally view technology differently. I usually take a pro-consumer angle instead of the marketing hype, which you’ve probably noticed in my writing. My house went on strike in August 2026. Nest Hubs got stuck, my Google Home routine didn't start, and every voice command got a reply that the device was out of reach. It wasn't a one-time occurrence either. Twice now, the smart home I paid for couldn't act without permission from a failing data center hundreds of miles away. Servers fail, and I don't blame Google for having a bad night. I blame myself for building a house that needed Google to have a good one. Every hop between you and the bulb is a place it can break Sub-second latency is a very good disguise Credit: Lucas Gouveia / Android Police When you ask Gemini to, let's say, switch a smart plug, the instruction takes a detour before it reaches the plug. It leaves your house, crosses your ISP, and goes to a Google data center. From there, it is handed off to the plug manufacturer's cloud, which processes the logic that sends a signal to close the relay. Every link in that chain is a surface where things can break. In June 2025, a bug in Google Cloud Platform led to a three-hour global outage that took Home and Nest services offline worldwide. Most of the time, this chain is invisible, and that's why people put up with it. The round trip finishes in under a second, so nobody notices they're renting their house's brain until things go south. Fixing that means two things. The logic that runs my house has to run on something in my house, and my devices have to take orders from that something without a trip through anyone's cloud. Local control was always the point of Matter Home Runtime came two years late, but it still counts The Connectivity Standards Alliance built Matter around local network execution. In a Matter home, telling a light to turn on runs over your local network, and you don't need an internet round trip to change the bulb's state. Google helped write Matter and supported it from day one, but its implementation kept sending even the most basic commands through the cloud for two years, drawing fair criticism for undermining what Matter was supposed to fix. That held until January 2025, when Google came to its senses and rolled out local control of Matter devices through an architecture called Home Runtime. Local control doesn't help if the schedule still lives on a server The brain of the house is still on a lease A Matter bulb no longer needs Google to switch on. But the routine that decides if, when, and what still runs on Google's servers. Google let some automations execute locally on its hubs earlier this year, without telling you which ones qualify, and its fine print says automations depend on a working internet connection and Google's services being up. If you want your automations to survive the next outage, for now, that means putting a brain in the house. A controller that runs your schedules on gear you own. I'm using Home Assistant. Home Assistant is open source software that runs on a small box in your house, and its job is to hold your automations and start them on time. The official hardware is Home Assistant Green, a fanless unit about the size of a paperback that plugs into your router over Ethernet and costs around $200. A Raspberry Pi does the same job if you'd rather build it yourself. Now this isn't a breakup with Google, unless you'd like it to be. Matter has a feature called multi-admin that lets one device belong to several controllers at once. Google stays the voice, and rightly so. Home Assistant gets whatever schedule I'm not willing to lose again. You can go further and replace Gemini if you're willing to run a local AI model. That's my current project, a rabbit hole that deserves its own article. The next outage already has a date When I press a switch or walk past a sensor, the light should come on. Not most of the time. Every time! Somehow, we accepted a cloud-dependent version that couldn't even manage that, mostly because local control used to be difficult to set up. That excuse is gone. Matter is mainstream now, and building a local-first home takes a weekend to set up. So do it before the next server failure, because it will happen.