For a brief moment, the internet genuinely believed Google had finally decided to kill off the original Chromecast, after multiple Gen 1 users reported casting failures and apps refusing to connect over the past few days. Honestly, considering the tiny streaming dongle is now more than a decade old, nobody would have been completely shocked, but thankfully, Google now says the issue has been resolved, and the aging Chromecast survives another day.
Google says your old Chromecast is still safe for now
According to updates shared on Reddit, the company says the issue impacting casting functionality has now been resolved, though some users are still reporting lingering problems after factory resets.
The situation immediately reminded longtime Chromecast users of last year’s infamous “Untrusted Device” outage, where Chromecast 2nd Gen and Chromecast Audio devices suddenly stopped functioning because of expired security certificates. Back then, Google had to rush out a server-side fix while also begging users not to factory reset their devices during troubleshooting.
And honestly, the panic this week makes sense. Google officially ended software and security updates for the first-generation Chromecast back in 2023, while the entire Chromecast lineup itself was discontinued in 2024 in favor of the newer Google TV Streamer hardware.
The original Chromecast surviving this long is already kind of ridiculous
Let’s be real, the original Chromecast was never supposed to last this long in the first place. Google launched the tiny $35 streamer back in 2013, and somehow people are still using it daily in 2026 despite the thing having less processing power than a modern smartwatch.
That said, the original Chromecast did quietly changed the streaming industry forever. Before it arrived, turning a regular TV into a smart streaming screen was either expensive or painfully clunky, and Google’s tiny $35 dongle helped normalize cheap streaming devices long before Fire TV sticks and smart TV platforms took over. Honestly, the fact that people still panicked this hard over a decade-old Chromecast outage says everything about how successful that little gadget ended up being.