HomeKit No Response: Test the Apple TV or HomePod Hub First

By Paul Snyman · Published September 12, 2026 · 7 min read

One Accessory or All of Them?

This is the question that decides everything, and the Home app makes it easy to answer: open it and look at how many tiles say No Response.

• One accessory, everything else fine. That accessory has a problem: signal, battery, its own bridge, or a firmware state that a power cycle clears.
• Many accessories, or everything, at once. The home hub is the suspect. Every HomeKit accessory reaches the outside world and the automations through a hub, so a hub that drops takes the whole home with it.
• Everything, and only when you are away from home. The accessories are fine and so is the hub's local presence. The hub has lost its path out to iCloud, which usually means the internet connection dropped.

The rest of this page is for the second and third cases, because resetting accessories when the hub is at fault is how people lose an afternoon.

Step 1: Is the Hub on the Network at All?

Open PingKit, go to the Devices tab and tap Scan Network. Find the Apple TV or HomePod, note its address, then open Ping Test, enter it and send 50 packets.

A hub that does not answer a ping is not a hub. Power cycle it, check that it is on the same network as your phone rather than a guest network, and re-test. A hub that answers with heavy loss is on a marginal link, which for a HomePod mini in a back bedroom is entirely plausible.

Step 2: Check the Advertisements HomeKit Depends On

HomeKit is built on mDNS. Accessories announce themselves with _hap._tcp, the HomeKit Accessory Protocol; Apple devices publish _homekit._tcp, _airplay._tcp and _raop._tcp; Matter accessories use _matter._tcp; and Apple hardware also publishes _companion-link._tcp and, for an Apple TV acting as a sleep proxy, _sleep-proxy._udp. PingKit browses all of those among its 37 service types.

Open the Bonjour Browser in the Tools tab and look for them. Three patterns matter.

That second and third row are the most common cause of stubborn HomeKit problems in a house with a mesh, a range extender or a separate IoT network. If you want the background, What Is mDNS / Bonjour? explains why .local discovery stops at the subnet edge.

Step 3: Put the Hub Where It Can Do Its Job

1. Wire the hub if you can. An Apple TV on Ethernet is the most reliable home hub configuration there is, and it removes the whole class of problem this page describes.
2. Reserve its address. Bind the hub's MAC to a fixed IP in the router so a lease change never moves it.
3. Keep accessories and the hub on one network. If you have split an IoT SSID onto its own subnet, HomeKit will fight you. A separate SSID on the same subnet is fine; a separate subnet is not, unless your router forwards mDNS across it.
4. Check the guest network. Guest networks isolate clients from each other by design, which breaks every discovery protocol HomeKit uses.

The Part That Happens While You Are Asleep

Hubs tend to drop overnight, and you find out when a morning automation does not run. An iPhone cannot investigate that after the fact, because iOS does not let an app watch the network while it is closed.

The free PingKit Agent on a Mac that stays on does. It scans every five minutes, and a hub that goes unseen for fifteen minutes is marked offline with a timestamped entry, so the next morning you can see that the hub was gone in the small hours instead of guessing. Two things to keep in mind when you read it. The fifteen-minute grace means a hub that drops for five minutes and comes straight back is recorded as nothing at all, by design. And the timestamp is when the Agent concluded the hub was gone, not when it went, so the real departure is fifteen to twenty minutes earlier than the entry says. Device Offline alerts are off by default: turn the Device Offline toggle on in the Agent's Settings under Device Alerts and, until the next Agent update, set Offline scans before alert, one section below under Alert Debouncing, to 1.

It also pings 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8 every thirty seconds and raises Internet Down after three consecutive failures, with Internet Restored after two good checks. That is the alert that explains the away-from-home case: the hub never left your network, your connection did. PingKit Guardian brings both to the iPhone. The alert reaches the iPhone through your own private iCloud, which is one hop and best effort rather than instant.

Honest Limits

• PingKit is not a HomeKit client. It cannot see accessory state, run automations or tell you why an accessory refused a command. It tells you about the network underneath.
• The Bonjour Browser only sees advertisements that reach your phone. Absence is evidence about the network path as much as about the device.
• Battery accessories on Bluetooth rather than WiFi will not appear in a LAN scan at all. They reach HomeKit through the hub, not through your router.
• Device Offline alerts need a Mac running the Agent, and it must be awake. An iPhone cannot detect a device leaving between scans.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do all my HomeKit accessories say No Response at once?

Almost always the home hub rather than the accessories. An Apple TV or HomePod that has dropped off the network, or an mDNS path that is broken between subnets, makes every accessory unreachable at the same moment. Ping the hub first, and check whether _hap and _airplay advertisements are still visible from your phone.

How do I know if my Apple TV home hub is offline?

Scan your network and ping the Apple TV's address. If it does not answer, it is off the network, whatever the Home app says. A Mac running the free PingKit Agent records when a hub is marked as having left and when it returns, which is how you catch the overnight drops; turn Device Offline alerts on to be told about it, because they are off by default.

Does HomeKit work across two subnets?

Not reliably. HomeKit discovery is mDNS, and mDNS does not cross a subnet boundary without a router configured to forward it. If you have put accessories on a separate IoT network with its own subnet, that alone can produce permanent No Response.

Can a guest network break HomeKit?

Yes. Guest networks isolate clients from one another, which blocks the discovery traffic HomeKit depends on. Accessories and the hub need to be on a network where they can see each other.

Why does my hub drop overnight?

Often power saving on the access point, a nightly router reboot, or a DHCP lease renewal that does not go cleanly. Wiring the hub with Ethernet and reserving its IP address removes both of the last two. A record of the exact drop and return times, which the PingKit Agent keeps, is what tells you which one you have.

Related Articles

• Bonjour Browser: see what your network advertises
• What Is mDNS / Bonjour? .local Hostnames Explained
• Get Notified on Your iPhone When Your NAS, Plex or Home Server Goes Offline
• PingKit Agent for Mac