Philips Hue White smart bulbs stopped working

[jay343]

Starting Thursday night, 12/6/2018, all of the Philips Hue White bulbs stopped responding at once. I have four of them. Alexa reports that the device is not responding (check power and network, etc). In the Alexa app, all of them have a "device unresponsive" error message. Discovery does not detect them.

I have tried resetting two of them using the option that appears after failing to find any new devices ("get help connecting"). I entered the serial number of a bulb, and after a short pause, the bulb briefly blinks off and back on. The app seems to regard it as a successful factory reset and immediately runs discovery, but nothing is found. I tried that on two different bulbs.

I also tried removing all of the bulbs from the configuration. Still no discovery and they no longer appear in the configuration.

There is no associated skill to disable/enable because I am not using the Philips hub.

According to the last Amazon tech I spoke to, the Echo Plus I am using has not been updated since early November, so there is no firmware patch that might have caused this problem.

I suppose it's possible that the bulbs themselves have been updated, but I think that's unlikely because I happen to have two other bulbs that I have not tried to use since last December. I tried one of them, but no joy.

My son also has Philips Hue bulbs that are still working. They are colored flood lamps, so a different model from the ones I'm using. Maybe the problem is model dependent?

Any ideas??

Thanks,
-Jay

[renegade600]

are you able to access the lights and use them in the hue app?

try a power cycle on your router.  if that does not help, try a power cycle on your modem, router, hue hub.  unplug them all for a 20 count.  then plug in the modem, wait for it to completely reset, then do the router, wait for reset, then the hue hub. 

[jay343]

are you able to access the lights and use them in the hue app?

Thanks for the reply.

No, I cannot access the lights with the Hue app because I do not have a Philips Hue hub. The Echo Plus itself is the hub. Worked fine for the last 12 months...

-Jay

[renegade600]

still try the power cycle but instead of the hue hub, power cycle the plus

[jay343]

Got it working! Turns out that you must reset them twice. All of them behaved exactly the same way. To recap:
1) All four bulbs simultaneously stopped working. Other Zigbee plugs and switches continued to work.
2) Normal troubleshooting steps did not work (resetting the Echo, disable/enable devices, multiple new device scans, removing all smart bulbs)
3) The bulbs seemed to respond  to the "Reset Philips Hue bulb" command, because they would flash once immediately after sending the reset command, but then they would not be discovered in the following scan. Repeating the discovery scan was also negative.
4) Resetting the bulb a second time causes the bulb to respond to the next scan. In each case, the bulb would flash once after the reset command, and then would flash three times during the scan as they were being discovered by Alexa.

FYI, the Alexa app has been updated, so most of the existing instructions for resetting Philips Hue bulbs are no longer valid. In the current Android version of the Alexa app, 2.2.241878.0, you can find the reset command as follows:
1: Tap the Smart Home icon on the lower right corner of the screen
2: Tap the "+" icon in the top right corner of the screen
3: Select Add Device (this takes you to the SETUP screen)
4: Tap the ? icon on the top right, which takes you to a HELP screen
5: Scroll down to the bottom of the page, tap "here" in the following sentence: "Access pairing instructions for common Zigbee devices here" which takes you to another HELP screen (untitled, connection help?)
6: Scroll down to "RESET PHILIPS HUE LIGHT"
7: Enter the serial number of the bulb to reset
8: Tap Continue, you will see a dialog asking if the light is turned on.

You should see the bulb flash off briefly. Apparently, there is no error message if you do not get the serial number right, so double check the serial number and try again if there is no response at all.

The first time you reset the bulb, the scan will find nothing. At that point you can get back to the connection HELP page with the Hue reset command by tapping the "Get help connecting" button.

Simple, right?

-Jay

[jay343]

BTW - the cause of the Philips Hue bulbs all becoming unresponsive at the same time is still a mystery....

[renegade600]

BTW - the cause of the Philips Hue bulbs all becoming unresponsive at the same time is still a mystery....

it is just something that happens.  I just went through it with the wemos (see my other post).    sometimes it is best to just wait a bit instead of messing with settings and it will fix itself. 

[asianrocker]

Agreed it does happen and I can relate to the panic you feel. LOL. the fix is either wait it out or reboot there's really no other way.

Most of the time it's coz of the update.