Some Google Home Speakers caught downloading hundreds of gigs of data

Some Google Home Speaker owners are currently experiencing an issue in which hundreds of gigabytes of data are being continuously downloaded to their device in the background. The bug, reported by 9to5Google and several Reddit users over the last week, may be caused by the speakers failing to correctly download and install a firmware update, with one Redditor finding that his device was consuming more than 200GB per day. Thankfully, Google is aware of the issue. In a statement to 9to5Google, the company said that “a fix is already rolling out that should address this for users.” Most of the reports are tied specifically to the new Google Home Speaker model, but it isn’t clear how widespread the issue is. We’ve reached out to Google to request more information about the cause and confirm impacted devices. My colleague Tom Warren confirmed that his own speaker is unaffected, and 9to5Google reports another Home Speaker in a different household downloaded just 2GB in the past month, compared to to 132GB used by an impacted device over the same period. A big concern for anyone with a limited data plan here is that the bug could quickly eat through the allotted limit, and they wouldn’t know unless they regularly check to see how much data their devices are using.