Google Home speakers have been experiencing widespread lag and outages, with many owners reporting their devices running slowly or becoming completely unresponsive in the morning.
Multiple Reddit threads in the r/GoogleHome community describe speakers that continue to listen to commands, but take much longer than usual to produce an audio response. Some of those reports note that response times reach around 30 seconds, with some requests never completing and timing out before the speaker can respond.
This slowdown appears to be unrelated to the age of the hardware, with affected users reporting the same lag on both newly purchased Google Home speakers and older units that have been around for years.
At least one owner said that in addition to a delayed response, the speaker went completely offline with no visible trigger, suggesting that the issue extends beyond Gemini’s response time to the device’s connection itself.
The disruptions follow a pattern of recurring problems across Google’s smart speaker lineup, with Gemini suffering another failure just a few weeks ago and Google previously acknowledging that Google Home’s overall performance has slowed.
The approval comes after a growing amount of user dissatisfaction, reflected in the r/GoogleHome subreddit’s habit of regularly running megathreads for members to voice their complaints about the platform, among other things.
Google Gemini’s Downdetector status page shows no major outages at this time, but the reported issues are above the normal baseline, indicating a small outage rather than a platform-wide outage. Gaps between user reports and official tracking of the situation make it difficult to accurately measure the number of households affected by the economic slowdown at this stage.
The timing coincides with Google’s rollout of its latest home speaker hardware and Gemini’s expansion into older devices, two changes that are likely to strain the broader smart speaker network overall.
Google has not made any official statements regarding the reported delays or outages as of the publication of this article.
