I wish I could say I was surprised :(. Along with a bunch of other people who've used their products for a decade or more now, I've been watching the ever steepening downward spiral of the company really becoming noticeable over the last 3-4 years. In an academic way, it's actually been kind of fascinating to watch happen in real time over the course of years with fairly front room seats. Seeing the deepening technical debt (lots of very old hardware still sold as new with no replacements in sight, inability to migrate their frameworks or keep their sources up to date and more), bikeshedding ramp up and up, the forums start to fall apart, marketing starting to write more and more checks development couldn't keep up with and then that getting brushed under the rug (the SHD and it's dedicated security radio comes to mind), the forums getting nuked entirely in favor of a horrible New Web thing with even worse bug/feature tracking then before and there wasn't any proper one before, ever worsening stability, universally hated UI changes that would just get shoved through anyway, and on and on. It's been everything one reads about, "Ubiquiti's Burning Platform" and all that, and in turn seems like it should be avoidable. Yet on it ground with sickening inevitability. It's just now finally starting to reach critical mass and become visible to the more general public, spreading through the same tech grapevine that gave them such a boost in the first place.

But less academically it's depressing as hell too, because the grapevine liked them for good reason and there still isn't any drop in replacement. Their p2p/p2mp gear is still solid. And UniFi was a wonderful concept solidly executed. It also eschewed the subscription/cloud bullshit so many other players are chasing, which indeed is something of a saving grace here. While there is a cloud option, lots (if not most) people can and do run their UniFi networks completely self-hosted even for remote sites. The single pane of glass, ease of provisioning and recovery, etc made sense and saved time. And they had an incredibly enthusiastic and supportive community, like when they asked about moving L3 switching way back on the old forums (back when the rot was in its earliest stages and not clear yet) they got huge amounts of feedback, their beta testing had many people putting in a lot of good work.

Such a damn stupid waste. And the nature of the beast for tech infrastructure is that market signals are always behind the curve and thus muted until things are already getting to be too late. Robert Pera also owns the majority of their stock IIRC so there isn't any way to effect an outside management change there either. It is odd to me that nobody has sought to go after them directly and aggressively, though I heard rumblings late last year that Cisco was giving a go at something clearly aimed right at the UniFi market (no subscriptions like Meraki)?

At any rate, final straw for me on routing was the flop their "UXG" has been, I finally gave up at long last and began migrating everything to OPNsense a month back. And once the single pane of glass is broken, the barrier to start moving more drops in turn and network effects (harhar) begin to go into reverse. I'd still be happy if they somehow recovered, but if they do I think it'll be a long time. Problems that build for years tend to take years to reverse too, if they can be. I hope we get some stories someday internally on how it all went down.