Something is really wrong with ChromeOS 119

This morning, I posted a quick article outlining an issue I came across with the new Chromebook Plus features in ChromeOS 119 randomly vanishing from my Lenovo Flex 5i Chromebook Plus. It was strange and we still don’t have an exact reason as to why it happened: though I think I may have a better idea after digging a bit deeper this afternoon.

ChromeOS 119 is gone

After publishing that post earlier, I went to dig around for any hint of different versions of ChromeOS 119 out there, and I came across something a bit startling. ChromeOS 119 is basically gone for the time being. If you have already upgraded to 119, it won’t go away, but if you were to jump to the Beta Channel of ChromeOS 120 and head back to the Stable Channel (effectively re-writing your disk image), you would end up back on ChromeOS 118 right now, not ChromeOS 119.

The servers that are responsible for doling out updates keep all of this in line for each channel, and taking a quick look at where we are right now, you’ll note that not one single device in the ChromeOS family has version 119 available to them right now. Not one.

This is indicative of a big issue

As you can probably guess, an update being pulled 10 days after its arrival isn’t a good thing. We see this happen for certain models from time to time, but it’s rare that an update goes out across the board and then gets pulled for every single device afterwards. It’s a clear sign that something with the new version is out of whack.

And perhaps this is what caused my Chromebook Plus issue this morning. My Flex 5i is still on ChromeOS 119, and perhaps there is something on a server level that got crossed up and made my device temporarily unaware that it should have the Chromebook Plus features. That’s a stretch, I know, but it feels a bit too coincidental not to be the case.

Either way, if for some reason you’ve been waiting to update to ChromeOS 119 and can’t get there, now you know why. I hope the underlying reason is fixed up and this version is re-released before later in December when lots of new Chromebook users will be unpacking their new Chromebook hardware. I suppose its good that ChromeOS 118 – the now-current version – still has all the Chromebook Plus upgrades, but this just looks bad. We’ll update if we learn more.