@DEcosse 

Great For You!

@Riley_S 

Given the odd switch behavior that was cured by a restart I've gone and restarted every Kasa switch.  Nothing else.  No Feits, routers, ISP fiber term, Ring, Alexa, streaming eqp, etc.  Just Kasa equipment.

1)  Two more devices were apparently hung, and were so bad they would not even take a reload.  I don't know why that is, nor if the reload pulls from the cloud or from the device itself.  However, each required a factory reset.  That was: An HS200, hardware version 5, firmware 1.0.6, and an HS220 version 3.0 firmware 1.0.3.

2)  Alexa began working immediately.

3)  The master bathroom, which has been at -73db, went back to -50 db

4)  I've not seen another status change.   Been stable for an hour or so now.

Conclusions:

1)  I'd never doubted this network, and neither should you.  That only Kasa equipment was affected, or needed restarted, is telling.   That communications, both logical and physical, improved immediately is also telling.

2)  I think I've shown (other post and here) Kasa network drivers aren't reliable and/or stable enough.  Clearly that's across multiple switch types.  Improvements here are needed!!!  

3)  For that matter, now that it's clear a confused Kasa can hurt network communications, just how badly are Kasa drivers screwing up my network?

4)  I'm not at all happy learning switches are this unreliable in staying stable or even retaining configuration. 

5)  I strongly suggest you work to develop a restart routine that is aware of previous state, restarts switch, and returns to previous state.

6)  I begin to think we need to be able to make our own site configuration backups.  

Open:

1)  When a switch reloads is it pulling its configuration from itself or from the cloud?

2)  What would make two previously working switches become scrambled?

3)  What can happen to these devices such that many-to-all needed a reboot?

4)  Is it possible the device<-> cloud communication can become corrupt enough to affect other Kasa devices?  Is there something explicit in a Kasa communication that would affect all other Kasa devices and ONLY Kasa devices?  Are they doing a multicast?   This seems unlikely. 

It appears each device talks to only one server. These are likely served in a round-robin DNS scheme, although there could be load balancers behind the scene too.  This of course means no device talks to Alexa, google, etc.  Ergo we're more dependent on the backend that I'd expected.   Seems to be a scalability nightmare to me, but that's what they did.  What happens if that server goes into any king of maintenance or even trouble?

  @rmhart 

Just installed the beta version and the same issues occur.  Multiple devices are offline!

I also reconnected some devices last night.  And one of them is now offline again.  The devices were reset to factory and then reinstalled.

Thei si getting worse!

  @rmhart 

Here are some screen shots from the Kasa app (not bete) and the related screen shots from the Alexa app.

The problem is 100% on TP-Link Kasa and/or Alexa and how they communicate. When I have problems, The Kasa App works with all devices, no problem. But the Alexa App all of a sudden stopped working with the switches only. The dimmers still communicated to Alexa. I reset my router and it all came back. Why? If *Some* of the Kasa modules are fine and some are not, this is definitely a communications/software issue between Kasa and Alexa. you are billion dollar companies, Go fix it. There are other systems out there, and it is starting to look like a good idea to trash this Kasa junk and go elsewhere.

rmhart wrote

  @rmhart 

Just installed the beta version and the same issues occur.  Multiple devices are offline!

 

@rmhart I notice you have an iphone, same as @dafish 
The 'Trial' App version in Android continues to work for me with no issues since it was installed yesterday on either Alexa or Kasa

As @Riley_S suggested "I do not believe that the same fixes are pushed for both android and apple versions, so if the iOS version does not fix the behavior, try the android APK if you can." 

Early days yet but perhaps encouraging and some data for @Riley_S to take back, that the I-Phone App has made no difference in this regard, while the Android (albeit a sample of 1 and less than 24 hrs!) shows some promise. 

  @DEcosse 

I don't have any Android devices only IOS.  The beta app certainly seems to respond faster, but the same off-line issues continue.

What is strange is how the devices are off-line in the Kasa app, yet work in the Alexa app (mostly).

As others have said, I can delete the device in the Alexa app and usually it will reappear and function even though the Kasa app still shows off-line.

Again, the IOS beta version did not fix anything.

rmhart wrote

  @DEcosse 

I don't have any Android devices only IOS.  The beta app certainly seems to respond faster, but the same off-line issues continue.

 

 

As others have said, I can delete the device in the Alexa app and usually it will reappear and function even though the Kasa app still shows off-line.

 

 

  @rmhart I wasn't really suggesting to try an Android system - more just observing you had IOS and pointing out that @Riley_S had acknowledged that the 'fixes' were not necessarily the same and there was potential it might not be resolved and the results could be different. I think it's encouraging at least one platform appears improved (long way short of declaring 'solved' as yet) which should help the developers produce similar for the IOS version 
Yes, mine was behaving similarly with the 'old' version which was what was so confusing and pointing to not only local management but cloud server interaction also

Continues to be 'so far, so good ....' 

  @DEcosse 

I agree, that if one platform seems to work, they should know what the solution needs to be on the other one.

And thank you for your help in identifying the technical aspects!!

  @rmhart Try rebooting your router and see what happens - this should renew the local IPs by DHCP 
I had done this earlier yesterday and things looked normal, before I upgraded to the test app later that morning. 

  @DEcosse 

I use the Eeros and actually reboot all due to a OS upgrade which reboot them.  However, I will reboot this evening again and see what happens.