Insteon shut off its cloud without warning and left users' smart homes dead

Insteon, a smart-home company selling Internet-connected lights, thermostats, plugs, sensors and the Insteon Hub, appeared to shut down abruptly just before a weekend in April 2022, Ars Technica reported. Users said the service had been down for three days while the status page read 'All Services Online', the company forums were offline and no one answered on social media. Executives, including CEO Rob Lilleness, had scrubbed Insteon from their LinkedIn profiles.

Insteon's parent, Smartlabs Inc., was acquired in 2017 by Richmond Capital Partners, a firm founded by Lilleness, who became CEO. Its proprietary dual-mesh protocol competed with Z-Wave and Zigbee, and it had been one of two launch partners for Apple's HomeKit in 2015. With its servers down, the app was useless and users' automations and schedules stopped; the protocol had been reverse-engineered, so some could move to local control with Home Assistant, openHAB or Homebridge.

Home Assistant warned that users must not factory-reset an Insteon Hub, because setup needs to contact the now-dead servers. Ars Technica noted the company could have given a month's notice, open-sourced code or let forum members organise elsewhere, and criticised it for leaving customers and their gear 'in the lurch'.

Users' automations, schedules and app stopped working; hubs could not be reset; no refunds or notice reported

The company shut down its cloud without notice and kept its status page showing all services online.

Devices depended on the cloud for app control, automations and even initial hub setup, so a reset could no longer succeed.

No communication reached customers, with forums offline and executives removing their LinkedIn affiliations.

Insteon used a proprietary protocol rather than licensable standards, which made migration harder for owners without a community workaround.

A smart-home maker's real product is its cloud. Shutting it off silently, without notice or an open-sourced exit, leaves customers with hardware that cannot be reset.

The Insteon app became worthless, and users turned to the r/insteon subreddit for help. Home Assistant updated its Insteon page to say the company had shut down and turned off its cloud as of April 2022, and community integrations let many users keep devices working locally. Many wall switches would still operate as ordinary switches. Ars Technica reported no response from the company and no refunds or compensation at the time of writing.