Some Google Home Speakers Are Secretly Chewing Through Hundreds of Gigs of Data
A botched firmware update appears to be stuck in a download loop, and Google says a fix is already on the way.
Some owners of Google's Home Speaker are watching their internet data vanish into a mysterious background download that won't stop. The bug, first flagged by 9to5Google and corroborated by multiple Reddit users over the past week, is pulling in hundreds of gigabytes on affected devices, with one Redditor clocking over 200GB consumed in a single day.
The likely culprit, according to the report, is a firmware update that's failing to download and install correctly, leaving the speaker stuck trying over and over. Most of the complaints are coming from owners of the newer Google Home Speaker model, though it's not yet clear exactly how many devices are affected or what triggers the loop on some units and not others.
The scale of the problem becomes clear in the contrast between working and broken devices. 9to5Google found one unaffected Home Speaker in a different household used just 2GB of data over the past month. An impacted device, in that same stretch of time, burned through 132GB. The Verge's Tom Warren checked his own speaker and found it untouched by the issue, suggesting this isn't hitting every unit in the wild, just a subset tied to the failed update.
Google has confirmed it's aware of the problem. In a statement to 9to5Google, the company said a fix is already rolling out that should resolve the issue for affected users. The Verge has reached out to Google for more detail on what's causing the loop and which devices are impacted, but hasn't yet heard back.
For most households on unlimited broadband, a runaway smart speaker download is an annoyance rather than a crisis. The real risk falls on anyone with a capped data plan, particularly those relying on cellular hotspots, satellite internet, or other metered connections where a device silently pulling 100-plus gigabytes a month could blow through an entire allotment without warning. Since most people don't routinely check per-device bandwidth usage on their home network, the bug could easily go unnoticed until a bill or an overage notice shows up.
Until Google's fix fully rolls out, affected owners have limited recourse beyond keeping an eye on their router's data usage tools, if available, to catch the problem early.
