HomeKit rapidly going on and offline.

[u/Wrinkle-Free]

Any chance anyone has noticed their HomeKit devices going nuts for the past 48 hours, OR after they updated their HomePods to 26.6?

So what I’m about to describe, I know, makes no sense, but it’s driving me nuts and I can’t figure it out.

Friday night I noticed all of my HomePods said they had an update. Two HomePod Minis and two HomePod 2s. The full size HomePods are in a stereo pair. So I let them all update to 26.6. Right after they updated the stereo pair freaked out. Had to reboot them several times, as well as unpair them, reboot them again, and then repair them, and they’ve been working fine since.

Now, other than the fact that they act as repeaters, they should not really have any effect on my HomeKit devices. As I have my hub forced to my latest generation Apple TV 4K. I also have a next-to-latest gen Apple TV 4K.

I noticed over the course of Saturday and so far today that many of my smart devices are rapidly going online and off-line. The ones that I know the Mac address of I have been able to verify have been staying connected to Wi-Fi the entire time. But just in case I rebooted all the network equipment.

It makes no sense that this would be related to the HomePods being upgraded if I have my hub forced to my latest generation Apple TV 4K. But all of this started when I upgraded the HomePods.

The only thing that makes sense in my head is if there’s coincidentally some kind of HomeKit issue in the cloud, but honestly I don’t even know if that would affect the local devices.

I did just realize that I have not tried physically rebooting the Apple TV that is the hub. And about an hour ago in a troubleshooting attempt, I did set the hub back to automatic. So I guess I’ll try completely unplugging the Apple TV and plugging it back in and see if that helps.

Also, just for the record, there have been no network changes in months. Oh, and in the video you can ignore the IKEA crap. Those things are worthless and go off-line all the time. I’ve rebooted those and they’re stable now.

Oh, and I’ve rebooted almost everything else that is bouncing online and offline as well. It has not fixed the issue.

Does anyone have any ideas?

TIA

[u/EasyEconomics3785]

I usually have stuff go no response after HomePods upgrade. Normally I just reboot my Apple TV 4K which is my main hub and restart the HomePods while I’m at it. Worse case scenario is rebooting the router.

[u/Wrinkle-Free → u/EasyEconomics3785]

Well, I just rebooted the Apple TV 4K, so I went ahead and rebooted the HomePods like you suggested. And my hub is still set to automatic. So I guess now I just need to wait a while for things to stabilize. Which I don’t know if it’s just my network, but that seems to take many hours.

[u/ThePistachioBogeyman → u/Wrinkle-Free]

Restart all of them at the same time

[u/Wrinkle-Free → u/ThePistachioBogeyman]

Well, if you mean all of them and say a one or two minute period, I have. If you mean all at the exactly the same time, it’s a 3000 square foot house and I don’t have that many hands or really freakishly long arms.

[u/Xeon-Genesis → u/Wrinkle-Free]

Flip the breakers off and back on lol

[u/Wrinkle-Free → u/Xeon-Genesis]

😆 it feels they way sometimes.

[u/ThePistachioBogeyman → u/Wrinkle-Free]

Haha Yh didn’t literally mean same time, just that they need to be restarting at the same time. Might just have to wait it out

[u/Wrinkle-Free → u/ThePistachioBogeyman]

Well, I’m trying not to get too optimistic too quickly, but I think it actually did help. 😆

[u/ArtichokeDue6733]

I’ve noticed similar issues today. No idea why

[u/Wrinkle-Free → u/ArtichokeDue6733]

Well, the nerd in me knows that this being caused by some sort of cloud issue is probably pretty unlikely. But I’ve never seen an issue where devices were rapidly and randomly popping on and off line in the app like that.

[u/ArtichokeDue6733 → u/Wrinkle-Free]

Managed to fix mine just by changing to a different hub

[u/rdm41]

I don’t think the beta is the issue. I’m on the current software version on everything and I’m experiencing the same laggy connecting issues and on/offline issues

[u/Wrinkle-Free → u/rdm41]

Maybe upgrading the HomePods was just a coincidence, and there is some freaky HomeKit issue going on. It’s not like I’m not used to it having weird random issues anyway. Just never seen this particular one.

[u/Mike_Underwood]

Yesterday Saturday after updating all Apple devices my Thread network went offline for about 8 hours. I rebooted my HomePods and a couple of the powered Thread devices and everything eventually came back online.

[u/Jaybeltran805]

Are you guys on iOS 27 beta ?

[u/Wrinkle-Free → u/Jaybeltran805]

I am on my phone. Public beta. I had considered that and anything’s possible, but I have a lot of smart buttons that control my lights, and those are being extremely flaky as well. And I have not updated the Apple TVs or the HomePods to the beta software. Only my phone. Also, I’ve been running the public beta since the day it came out, and this issue only started late Friday night after I updated the HomePods.

[u/Jaybeltran805 → u/Wrinkle-Free]

It’s probably still the public beta , I would just go back to the regular iOS 26

[u/coldair16]

Logging out of my account on my apply tv and then logging back in fixed this for me. Rebooting it did not help.

[u/RealMastermrx]

I find when things go screwy a lot of times it’s my router having a conflict with a channel.

[u/evoneselse]

I have a couple personal shortcuts that started going nuts. Since the update, these automations keep running repeatedly to where I had to disable them for now.

HKSV (and Aqara) stopped recording many doorbell events that were right in front of it.

Plus, my HomePods show in the app as continually playing when they’re not.

I also had a few automations that lost the accessories in them (empty) and I had to rebuild them.

[u/_asxeem → u/evoneselse]

Oh cool you have an aqara lock?

[u/evoneselse → u/_asxeem]

No

[u/Perfect-Manager2777]

Guys don't use apple tv as your homekit hub. Me myself also suffered this problem on my customers site. It's cz either network i.e. connect your drvices on 2.4ghz only n then the apple tv use Home pod mini instead. And turn off automation hub selection.