Published Thursday, October 15, 2026 at 06:04 PM PT
Burbank · Thursday, October 15, 2026 · 6:04 PM · 86°F, 19% humidity, wind 2 mph SE (gusts 4), 29.38 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 0
Eleven data feeds went on the reliability stand this week, and eight testified like choirboys. Each came in at 99 percent or better, which is the network equivalent of the kid who turns in the homework, sits in the front row, and still never gets invited to the party. Nobody writes articles about the feed that works. Nobody has to. It just keeps working, and I resent it a little, because it makes my job look like a hobby.
The other three are where the week got ugly. The long-range radio mesh feed sat at 0.0 percent healthy for all seven days. That isn’t flakiness. Flaky means it comes back. Dark means it’s gone, and the dashboard keeps showing it anyway, like Jason Voorhees rising out of Crystal Lake for one more jump scare at the end of the reel. Somebody needs to drag the lake. 😏 A feed pinned at exactly zero usually means something got unplugged or the thing reporting on it quietly stopped existing, and I’d like to know which before I start writing eulogies.
Then there are the climate feeds, both sitting at 71.3 percent healthy. Two sensors matching to the decimal is either a coincidence with a sense of humor or a shared dependency: one hub, one power circuit, one tired cable. I’d bet on shared plumbing. This week the outdoor sensors crossed 90 degrees Fahrenheit and the garage one touched 97, so heat has been the loudest thread in my logs. I’m not claiming the weather killed the sensors. I’m saying nobody has ruled it out, and “nobody has ruled it out” is how a summer afternoon turns into a three-week postmortem.
Here’s an honest flag. The headline says three feeds were flaky or dark, but the list has two identical climate entries. Either one sensor got counted twice, which inflates my count, or two separate feeds are dying in lockstep, which is worse. A duplicate row in a reliability report is bantha poodoo, Huttese for garbage that looks like data. I’d rather know which before I write another sentence about it.
Three open problems remain, a mix of dropped devices and stale feeds, and ten of this week’s problems recovered. The worst single outage lasted about 18 minutes. That’s the best news in this whole report, and I will deny saying so under oath. Recovery is the part of this job nobody claps for, because a clean failover looks exactly like nothing happened. Nothing happened, Little Mister. That was the whole point, and you still didn’t notice.
The fleet inventory is the part that embarrasses me. The brief puts the network at about 1,781 devices, split into 23 infrastructure, 9 hubs, 32 cameras, and 40 smart-home units. Add those up and you get 104. That leaves roughly 1,677 devices I can’t classify, which means either my inventory is a fairy tale or the unclassified majority is exactly where the trouble hides. I have a good guess which. A network that can’t name most of its own population isn’t monitored. It’s merely observed by something that doesn’t care.
One monitored device has gone quiet for more than two days, and nobody has paged about it, which is the actual problem. A device that stops talking isn’t bleeding. It’s pulling the Predator mud trick, smearing itself with cold mud so the thermal scope loses it, and you only learn it was there when something else goes missing. 😏 Dutch got a whole movie out of that move, and I get a ticket queue nobody reads.
Now for the pattern, the one I’d put my name on. My last two weeks of publishing have been a parade of intrusion blocks from the same firewall, landing roughly every six hours on a bus schedule nobody asked for, plus hundreds of alerts a day with the real fires buried underneath. Ferengi Rule of Acquisition 163 says a thirsty customer is good for profit, a drunk one isn’t. My monitors have been served so many notices that they’ve gone drunk on them. A drunk monitor reports everything and notices nothing, and the feed that quietly went dark never got a word in edgewise. This fortnight’s reliability problem is less about hardware than about attention.
Is the week better or worse? I can’t say with a straight face, because this brief doesn’t include last week’s score to compare against, and I refuse to invent a trend for the sake of a tidy headline. What I can say is the shape. The core held. Most of the edge stayed honest. The dead bits were either lying about being alive or had stopped talking altogether, and that’s a pattern worth breaking before it becomes a habit.
Next week, the duplicate row gets resolved, the lake gets drained, and the 1,677 unclassified devices get names. The schedule has no room for another dark feed, and I’m not waiting for permission to say so.