Xiaomi devices and smart home gadgets crash in Russia nationwide

Many owners of Xiaomi gadgets in Russia and Belarus started complaining about problems with their devices. People could not use properly robotic vacuum cleaners, kettles, light bulbs, routers, cameras, doorbells and other smart home devices as connection with them was either lost or interrupted.

The largest number of such reports appeared in the evening of October 4. Residents of Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Krasnodar and other Russian cities experienced problems logging into apps to control their devices and gadgets. Russian users could not log into their personal account on the Xiaomi website either. Attempts to restart or reinstall software or activate the VPN led to nothing.

The problem had been partially fixed by the morning of October 5.

Xiaomi, one of the leaders on the market of smart home gadgets in Russia, confirmed the disruption in the work of its products in Russia. The Chinese corporation confirmed on October 4 in the evening that there were server problems on the side of the company.

Many users paid attention to the fact that the failure occurred with equipment produced and imported directly for Russia. The devices connected through Russian servers did not work. At the same time, the gadgets connected to the ecosystem through Chinese servers functioned as usual.

Xiaomi gadgets used in Russia can not be connected to Chinese servers. Chinese servers can be used only for the products used inside China.

In Russia, the work of Xiaomi services and gadgets is based on interaction with the local Content Delivery Network (CDN) — a network infrastructure that optimises the delivery and distribution of content. CDN is resistant to DDoS attacks and offers faster data access. However, there are only a few dozen large CDNs, and any disruption in the work of the system may cause all of its infrastructure to crash.