[chias]

Same with Google Wifi and Google Home Nest. Also, fun fact, during an internet outage some time ago I learned that your Google Wifi can't even route locally if you don't have a live connection to the internet. That is, my Desktop could not connect to my NAS -- both wired via Ethernet to my Google Wifi network -- because there was no Internet access.

This is a "feature", and is working as intended: https://twitter.com/madebygoogle/status/1294819896019189761

Don't buy Google home networking equipment.

[boulos]

Disclosure: I used to work for Google and still work for Alphabet.

That response is a little confusing: the management app is Internet only, but it doesn't drop all its routing tables or something just because the uplink is gone. Moreover, the regular DHCP and so on will operate just fine while not connected to the internet.

I don't know what happened in your case and I totally agree that it's a bad experience for troubleshooting (the thing even has some weird API on it [1], so why isn't there some basic web-based management tool), but you can absolutely unplug the uplink and packets flow locally.

[1] https://github.com/olssonm/google-wifi-api

[chias]

We had also had a power outage, which I suspect caused it to lose it's routing tables for some reason. Power was out for about a week, internet was out for about three weeks. When power came back, the Google WiFi was essentially a fancy brick with LEDs until the internet came back too.

Luckily I had a ~15 year old Cisco router I could temporarily replace it with.

[charcircuit]

Don't misrepresent them. It's a limitation. Not a feature.