Robot Vacuum Apps From MOVA, Narwal and Potentially Others Hit by 6-Hour Worldwide Outage
MOVA and Narwal robot vacuum apps suffered a worldwide outage lasting about six hours Wednesday evening, leaving owners unable to connect to their devices.
Mobile apps for robot vacuums from MOVA and Narwal, and potentially other manufacturers, suffered server problems worldwide Wednesday evening, leaving owners unable to connect to their devices.
The outage lasted approximately six hours, beginning around 6 p.m. EDT Wednesday, October 28 (10 p.m. UTC), and ending around midnight EDT Thursday, October 29 (4 a.m. UTC), according to user reports and VacuBots’ own observations.
Neither MOVA nor Narwal has issued a statement or status update about the outage, and neither has explained the cause or said whether the problems have been fully resolved.
Owners of both brands turned to company-related Facebook groups and Reddit to report connection problems and ask for help. Many said the apps would not load or let them control their robots, even after restarting their routers, resetting Wi-Fi connections and rebooting the devices.
Reddit threads titled "Narwal app problem" on r/NARWAL and "Can't connect to my MOVA account" on r/MOVA_robotvacuum were among the posts.
VacuBots experienced the outage firsthand with the MOVA Z60 Ultra Roller Complete and the Narwal Flow 2. Both robots were inaccessible through their apps. The Narwal Flow 2 was partway through a scheduled whole-house cleaning when the outage began.
The Narwal app initially displayed Wi-Fi errors, then showed a "Network error. Reconnecting" message and failed to load the robot's map or respond to commands. The robot appeared to get lost and had to be placed on the dock manually.
It was not immediately clear whether other manufacturers were also affected or whether the outage had a single underlying cause, such as a shared cloud provider.
Based on our first hand experience, apps for robot vacuums from Eufy and Roborock did not appear to be affected.
