Owners of the Wink Hub are discovering that their smart homes were a bit less intelligent over the weekend — and anyone still wanting to buy a Wink Hub will now have to wait.
Wink, the maker of a smart home system designed to control lights and other electrical devices from an app, has suspended all retail sales of its $50 central Hub while it works through a glitch that bricked many of the Hubs on Saturday.
According to Wink’s support site, the problems began Saturday when the company began seeing “increased errors on messages coming from hubs.” That led to what Wink calls a “complete service disruption” for nearly twelve hours: Owners were not able to control their devices with the Wink app, and any schedules or other automated processes didn’t work.
The problem, according to the company, was “misconfiguration” of a “security measure” that was “completely avoidable and is extremely embarrassing.” While Wink doesn’t go into technical detail on its status page, Engadget reports that the blame should be put on an expired security certificate.
Wink has since pushed out a software update that has fixed the problem for what the company says is a majority of owners, but the rest are being asked to return their hubs for replacement, or try a do-it-yourself home router DNS fix.
Wink is offering $50 gift cards to all affected users, hopes to restart retail sales within a week, and maintains that all Wink-controlled homes “were completely secure and never vulnerable” throughout the outage.
