Borked Chromecasts are beginning to receive their update
There’s good news on the horizon for Chromecast owners frustrated that their devices have stopped streaming and begun showing error messages instead: Google says it has started pushing out a fix.
As Iain Thomson of The Register reports, the company says that its deployment of a fix for the crippled devices will roll out in stages over the next few days:
Although there’s no official message on the support page as yet, Google has confirmed to us it will push out a patch over the internet to people’s Chromecasts during the next few days to address the error. Leaving your ‘cast powered on and connected to the ‘net should be enough to pick up the fix.
The firmware update shifts the devices over to a new Google-owned certificate authority, with an expiry date of 2045. Which means Chromecast users should have an extra 20 years to finish the binge of their favourite Netflix series, huzzah!
The news can’t have come too soon for the many Chromecast users who have found themselves unable to stream their favourite TV shows, movies, and other media.
Many users have expressed their annoyance with Google about the length of time it has taken the tech giant to contact affected users.
For instance, product manager David Graham posted on Twitter that it had taken Google four days to acknowledge that there was a problem with his 2nd Generation Chromecast, leaving him to ponder that if he hadn’t seen social media posts about the issue he would have thought he was the only one affected.
Unfortunately, although there is good news for people’s Chromecasts which stopped working due to the expired certificate, there is no fix yet for those users who took it upon themselves to conduct a factory reset thinking (incorrectly) that it couldn’t do any harm.
One reader of The Register, for instance, posted about his frustration after having followed Google’s standard online advice to perform a factory reset if all other remedies to problems did not help.
Unfortunately, it appears factory-reset devices cannot presently connect to the internet, and it looks likely that Google will have to push out an update to its Home app in an attempt to resolve the issue.
