Why You Shouldn’t ‘Fix’ Your Older Chromecast With a Factory Reset, According to Google

A mysterious bug is affecting numerous older Chromecast devices, as per a lengthy thread on Reddit—specifically, the second-generation Chromecast and the Chromecast Audio, which both launched in September 2015. If you've been affected, hold off on trying a factory reset of your device.

The bug has started appearing over the last 24 hours, rendering affected devices pretty much unusable. One of the error messages reported reads as follows: "Untrusted device: [name] couldn’t be verified. This could be caused by outdated device firmware."

Further investigation from users suggests that this is a server-side problem—so the issue is at Google's end. It looks as though there have been complications with expired security certifications, so the Chromecast dongles that have been hit are being incorrectly identified as unsafe to connect to.

That means there's nothing Chromecast owners can do for the time being, other than to sit tight and wait it out, without any streaming audio or video to entertain them in the meantime. Various troubleshooting steps have been taken, including reconnecting to wifi and running a factory reset, but no easy workaround has been found.

In fact, as per the latest information from Google, factory resetting your device is something you shouldn't do—even if it's the obvious first fix to try with a problem like this. We're still not sure exactly what's happened, but an official Google account has now responded on the original Reddit thread.

What Google says

As per the latest information from Google: "We're aware of an emerging issue impacting Chromecast 2nd-gen and Chromecast Audio devices and are working on a fix. Do not factory reset your device – we will keep you all updated when the fix rolls out. If you have already factory reset your device, we will provide instructions to set your device back up as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience."

It's a bit light on details, but at least the acknowledgement is there. It sounds as though the restoration process is going to be more complicated for those users who have already (and understandably) tried a factory reset, but apparently Google is going to be able to get all of these devices back online eventually.

There is a rather complicated workaround you can try that's detailed on Reddit, but unless it's especially urgent for you to get back up and running, I'd recommend sitting tight for now and waiting for Google to issue a fix. While no timeline has been specified for when the issue might be resolved, at least we know this is being worked on.

Given that the bug hasn't hit more recent Chromecasts, including the Chromecast Ultra, there was some concern that Google might have quietly killed off its older devices, now they're approaching their 10th birthdays—but that no longer seems to be the case.

The Chromecast device line as a whole has now been discontinued, so we won't get any more streaming dongles in the future, but Google hasn't said anything yet about pulling support for existing hardware. Chromecast functionality continues to be available in televisions running Google TV, as well as the Google TV Streamer.

View the full article