April 19, 2022

Lighting Controls Become Bricks as Smart Home Company Disappears

Users literally left in the dark following company's vanishing act

It’s frustrating when a lighting product fails. Users have to diagnose the issue and possibly purchase replacement parts, or perhaps a replacement fixture or two.

But what happens when the lighting failure is not simply an isolated bad driver or a broken trim? What happens when an entire system of lighting products simultaneously goes defunct because the smart lighting manufacturer and gatekeeper to its cloud servers just disappears without notice?

That’s exactly what happened to an estimated 1 million+ installations of smart home products from Insteon. According to multiple reports, the company’s smart home products stopped working, leaving users with broken smart home setups. And company executives have reportedly scrubbed their LinkedIn profiles, too.

Will issues like this cause hesitation when specifiers or occupants are faced with:

Trusting a lesser-known brand?
Utilizing a closed ecosystem platform, instead of an open protocol system?
Investing in a system that is cloud-dependent with little-to-no offline local control?

There has been a lot of Insteon coverage in IoT and smart home circles during the last 24 hours. Below are two of the best reports that we found:

Shameful: Insteon looks dead—just like its users’ smart homes »

Smart Home Company Insteon Shuts Down Servers Without Warning »

Insteon users have been left in the dark (literally) following the smart home company's vanishing act.https://t.co/KNSaHIv6bS
— Ars Technica (@arstechnica) April 19, 2022