Insteon Shut Down - Out of Business?
This past week and weekend, Insteon Hub users awoke to a rather unpleasant situation - their hubs no longer work. Insteon hubs are powered by Insteon cloud servers and without notice, they simply stopped working. The Insteon user forums have also vanished. All without any warning, notice, or communication from Insteon or the parent company SmartLabs.
Insteon users have noticed for some time now that devices were out of stock at smarthome.com and all other sellers including yours truly. There was a chance that they were being impacted by supply chain issues like most manufacturers. There was also some hope that Insteon was being rebranded under the Nokia name.
But with the servers and forums offline and not a peep from management, it appears the worst has come to pass. We can only assume that Insteon is no longer. Perusing Linked-In, Insteon employees have either removed their affiliation with the brand, or have posted their final employment date as April 2022. Did Insteon or SmartLabs go bankrupt? Nothing official has hit the news yet but they do appear to have shut down Insteon and the Smarthome store.
Insteon as a technology is still functional since devices do not rely on WiFi or the cloud to function in the home. Keypad buttons and scenes will continue to work, as well any directly linked buttons or scenes. Those users who are running smart home software or hubs other than the Insteon Hub would not be impacted by the cloud service being discontinued.
Insteon Hub users do have some options to get their system up and running again. Check out our post on alternative hubs and options here.
It would be wonderful if someone could find a way to get the servers back online at least temporarily, but without any news from SmartLabs or Insteon it's doubtful. But at least there are several other options that will allow Insteon users to continue using the gear they love, while migrating to Lutron Caseta, ZWave, Zigbee, WiFi or others.
RIP Insteon, you were loved.
