Quirky, the smart home startup that owns Wink, has posted the instructions for customers to fix their bricked Wink smart home hubs.
Wink is a smart home hub that lets users control various home appliances, such as the thermostat, light switches, and even garage doors, via a smartphone app connected to the Wink hub. On Saturday, Wink owners found their smart home hubs rendered completely useless after a misconfigured security measure from Quirky disabled their hubs and prevented them from connecting to Wink's servers. This means Wink cannot push out a software fix over the air.
"We are incredibly sorry for the magnitude of this weekend's issues," says the Wink team in a post on its website. "We know it takes a lot to earn your trust and fully expect that we've lost a great deal of it over the last 24 hours. We hope to move quickly to regain your faith in our platform."
Wink initially offered to fix customers' Wink hubs by having them shipped to Quirky's headquarters, where technicians can fix the devices then ship them back to the home owner's address. Quirky will take care of shipping expenses for customers who want to have their hubs fixed by the company.
However, customers who do not want the hassle of waiting for a shipping box when sending over their hubs to Quirky and waiting a couple of business days to get their Wink back, can try to fix their hubs themselves, provided they have a bit of technical knowledge about tinkering with their routers. Quirky says the fix is easy and takes just around 10 minutes. An important thing to remember for users is to write down or take a screenshot of their current DNS server addresses, as they will need to revert back to these once Wink has been fixed.
To fix your Wink hub, change your DNS server address to 52.4.183.25. If a second field is available, change that to 52.0.103.131. Save the new settings and restart your router if it does not restart automatically.
Next, unplug your Wink smart home hub and plug it back. Once the hub starts rebooting, it should immediately start updating to receive firmware update 00.86.0. Do not unplug the hub while it is updating. You will see it flash red and other colors during update. Once the hub flashes blue, it has completed the update. To confirm this, go to the settings section in the Wink app to make sure the firmware is version 0.86.0
Make sure you revert back to the original DNS server addresses, as you will not be able to connect to the Internet on the addresses provided by Quirky. If you failed to take note of your own DNS addresses, contact your Internet service provider or use the DNS settings hosted by Google. These are 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.
For more information about fixing your Wink hub yourself, check out this Quirky support page. Alternatively, you can also call technical support at 1-844-WINKAPP and one of the company's agents can walk you through the fix over the phone.
