Google Gives $5 Refund to Nest Aware Subscribers in Canada Affected by Outage

At the beginning of this week, customers of Google’s Nest Cameras suffered an outage, in what the company later blamed on a “scheduled storage server update” gone wrong. For four and a half hours, cameras did not record or stream live video (allowing Jack Bauer to do this handiwork).

Now, in an effort to make it up to customers, Google is emailing Canadian Nest Aware subscribers to notify them of a $5 refund coming to the credit card associated with their account. Yesterday, Droid-Life shared U.S. customers received $5 USD refund emails, but nothing was available for our Canadian account, until today.

“We know that our cameras are an important part of keeping your home and property safe, and we’re carefully looking across our systems to prevent this from happening again. Providing a trusted and secure infrastructure for your home is a responsibility we take very seriously,” writes VP of Google Nest, Rishi Chandra in an email.

Chandra explains, “As a Nest Aware subscriber, we understand you rely on our cameras and services. We’ll be issuing a $5 refund to the card associated with your account to thank you for your patience and for being a loyal Nest customer. No need to contact customer support – you’ll automatically receive an email once the refund has been processed.”



“We’re committed to building products that deliver helpful solutions for your home. We apologise for not meeting that expectation this week,” concluded Rishi.

We just received this email and it’s clear the $5 refund is regardless of how many Nest Aware subscriptions and Nest Cameras you own (wait, shouldn’t $5 USD be worth about $6.71 CAD or so?!).

Last fall, at Google’s ‘Made by Google’ event, the company announced a new version of Nest Aware was coming, offering whole home pricing, instead of a per camera pricing model, starting at $8 CAD per month. Google said at the time these new plans would become available in “early 2020”, but so far nothing has been announced yet.