Wink, a connected home startup and provider of smart home platform, suffered a day-long outage; appears to have lost control of its primary wink.com website

Wink is an Internet of Things (IoT) tech startup and provider of a smart home platform that brings hundreds of products from major brands together into the easy-to-use hub via its Wink mobile app. The Wink Hub allows your diverse collection of smart products to speak the same wireless language, so that you can easily control them—and customize their interactions—from the Wink app.

However, connected homes, like all things technology, comes with a lot of challenges. Today, Wink suffered a major outage that lasted almost the whole day. On top of it all, Wink appears to have lost control of its website. The outage also affected all Wink customers who depend on Wink’s primary domain to operate their connected devices. Wink did not elaborate on the cause of the outage.

Wink later apologized on social media after Chris Seahorn reported the outage on Twitter. Wink said: “We apologize for the experience. Our teams are working diligently to restore functionality as quickly as possible. You can find all updates about this issue posted on our page http://status.winkapp.com. Thank you for your patience and understanding.”

We apologize for the experience. Our teams are working diligently to restore functionality as quickly as possible. You can find all updates about this issue posted on our page https://t.co/8W8jIn0A7T. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

— Wink Smart Home Support (@WinkSupport) September 11, 2020

On its website, Wink said this:

“We are aware of an issue impacting the Wink platform. We just wanted to let you know that we’re still here, and we’re not under attack. Rest assured that we are working diligently to get everyone back online.
All updates will continue to be shared at status.winkapp.com.”

Wink’s status page reports that “an issue controlling devices connected to Wink” was first reported on September 10th at 22:20 UTC.  As of when this article is published, Wink said on its status page that it is still investigating the connectivity issues and offered no fixes.

 As of 8:43 PM EST, none of the Wink features is functional, including the core platform and all connections to third-party services.

Wink outages

The nightmare does not there for Wink’s customers. To make matters worse, Wink appears to have lost control over its primary wink.com domain. Wink.com domain now shows a GoDaddy landing page with a for sale message that reads: “Interested in wink.com? Our Domain Broker Service may be able to get it for you. Find out how.” Below is the screenshot of the GoDaddy landing page.