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Chromecast, Goo.gle Home May Be Overloading Your Wi-Fi.
Home smart speaker sales exploded over Christmas, reportedly because so many people gave them as gifts. Concerns over the ethics of giving someone a home spying device aside, it appears the hardware is causing real problems for Wi-Fi routers.

Originally, it was thought that the problem was confined to one Google device, the Google Home Max, and one company’s routers (TP-Link). Additional analysis has shown this is not the case, on either end. The Google Home Mini, Google Home, and Chromecast are all reportedly affected, as are routers from other companies. TP-Link has posted an update with their troubleshooting results. It reads, in part:

Following initial research and investigation, our engineering team is confident that they’ve determined one of the key origins of the issue. From what we have gathered so far, the issue appears to be related to some of the recent versions of Android OS and Google Apps.

This issue stems from these devices’ “Cast” feature, which sends MDNS multicast discovery packets in order to discover and keep a live connection with Google products such as Google Home. These packets normally sent in a 20-second interval. However, we have discovered that the devices will sometimes broadcast a large amount of these packets at a very high speed in a short amount of time. This occurs when the device is awakened from its “sleep” state, and could exceed more than 100,000 packets. The longer your device is in “sleep”, the larger this packet burst will be. This issue may eventually cause some of router’s primary features to shut down – including wireless connectivity.