Shameful: Insteon looks dead—just like its users’ smart homes

Article note: Oh Internet of Shit. A major vendor shuts down and their cloud back-end and renders all their gadgets inert. This shit is all irrelevant until there are reasonable interop standards and local hubs.

Enlarge / The lighting puns write themselves. (credit: Insteon)

The smart home company Insteon has vanished.

The entire company seems to have abruptly shut down just before the weekend, breaking users' cloud-dependent smart-home setups without warning. Users say the service has been down for three days now despite the company status page saying, "All Services Online." The company forums are down, and no one is replying to users on social media.

As Internet of Things reporter Stacey Higginbotham points out, high-ranking Insteon executives, including CEO Rob Lilleness, have scrubbed the company from their LinkedIn accounts. In the time it took to write this article, Lilleness also removed his name and picture from his LinkedIn profile. It seems like that is the most communication longtime Insteon customers are going to get.