Yesterday we broke the news that Google products like the Chromecast and Home cause Wifi drops for users around the world. The issue was confirmed by hundreds of users and Google has now responded to the issue.
Users with Asus, Linksys, Netgear, TP-Link or Synology routers suffered from the issue, resulting in temporarily Wifi drops. The issue appears to have started in October last year and is caused by a flood of MDNS multicast discovery packets. These packets are sent by specific apps on newer Android versions to discover Google products on the local network, and to keep the connection with them alive. The packet flood is generated when a device goes out of sleep and sometimes more than 100,000 packets, at high speeds, in a short time, needed to be processed by the router.
Further reading: Google releases patch for Chromecast and Google Home Wifi issues
Some routers are unable to handle the flood and either drop the Wifi connection with clients on the network, or disconnect the router from the internet.
Until now the only workaround appears to be disconnecting the Google products from the internet. But fortunately a fix is in the works. Google has told the website 9to5Google that a "team is working quickly to share a solution."
Although a fix from Google is the best option, also router vendors have released updates:
- Netgear released a hotfix for the R7000
- Netgear also released an update for its Orbi routers
- TP-Link has released an update for the Archer C1200
- Linksys has released firmwares for the WRT3200ACM and WRT32X
