Assistant's ability to send messages and set reminders broken, Google's aware and investigating

Of late, users of Google’s voice based service Assistant have been troubled. It’s being reported that the service suspends commands instead of completing them, displaying a ‘phone went offline’ error message.

What’s intended is that when you say OK Google, it should bring up Assistant, which should further get into interaction with the user. However, users say when they ask Assistant to do something like setting a reminder, then instead of performing the action, the service throws an error message stating ‘Sorry to interrupt, but your phone just went offline. We’ll have to try again when there’s a connection‘.

Specifically, when assistant is asked to add a reminder or send a text, it reverts back by asking ‘what’s the reminder’, and then flashes the error message, instead of setting up the reminder or sending the text (as can be seen in the following screenshots shared by users).

So basically what’s happening is, the OK Google command works fine, but Assistant pops up the disconnection or offline error while answering the follow up command. Also, this behavior is mostly being reported for setting reminders and sending messages, although some say the ability to make calls is also broken.

Though it doesn’t seem to be device specific, the issue in question is being majorly reported by Samsung and Motorola device users. Google finally acknowledged the issue on October 04, with a company employee saying,

I wanted to let you know our team is aware of and actively investigating this issue

Here’s the complete statement

It’s a relief for the affected users that Assistant’s disconnection glitch has been officially confirmed. There were no further updates as to by when will it be fixed. As for workarounds, you can try uninstalling some of the recent updates to the Google app, as several users say the problem went away after they did that.

Source 1 | Source 2 | Source 3 | Source 4 & 5 (Reddit)