Google Apologizes For Accidentally Wiping Google Wifi And OnHub Wireless Routers

Not surprisingly, Google Wifi and OnHub owners began pinging Google for help, which turned out to be a futile effort at first. This was exacerbated by the fact that Google didn’t seem to have any answers to customers’ questions about what had taken place. Four and a half hours after users were first left in the dark by their routers, Google came to the table with an official cause for the outages:

Today we experienced an issue with our Google Accounts engine that may have affected your Google Wifi or OnHub device. This caused some devices to automatically reset to the initial state you bought them in. Unfortunately, these devices need to be set up again. We'd like to share our sincerest apologies for the inconvenience.

This is a headache and a half for those affected, and you wouldn’t expect to have your router’s settings wiped out of the blue by the device’s manufacturer. Part of the appeal of Google Wi-Fi and OnHub is the ease of setup thanks to in part to tight integration with Google’s ecosystem. It’s those long tentacles, however, that appeared to be the direct cause of this widespread issue, which allowed what was most likely a seemingly minor Google Account issue to cause the routers to panic.

The Google Wifi Care Team added:

Unfortunately, when a device factory resets, all network settings and data is erased. This means that you will need to set back up your network as you did before, including device names, DNS settings, etc.. We know that this is not necessarily an easy or quick process for many of you with complicated network setups, but unfortunately this is the only way to setup your network again.

If you need help to help reconfigure your device, Google has laid out step-by-step directions here to get you back up and running. It should be a pretty easy affair for those with relatively simple network configurations, but might be a pain in the butt for those with more complex setups.

“We know how important Wi-Fi is to you and share our sincerest apologies for the inconvenience this has caused,” wrote Google senior product manager Ben Brown.