Amazon Shuts Down and So Do People's Homes

Oops.

Yesterday’s Amazon outage took down more than Netflix.

The outage at Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud-computing arm left thousands of people in the U.S. without working fridges, roombas and doorbells, highlighting just how reliant people have become on the company as the Internet of Things proliferates across homes.

The disruption, which began at about 10 a.m. Eastern time Tuesday, upended package deliveries, took down major streaming services, and prevented people from getting into Walt Disney Co.’s parks.

Affected Amazon services included the voice assistant Alexa and Ring smart-doorbell unit. Irate device users tweeted their frustrations to Ring’s official account, with many complaining that they spent time rebooting or reinstalling their apps and devices before finding out on Twitter that there was a general Amazon Web Services outage. Multiple Ring users even said they weren’t able to get into their homes without access to the phone app, which was down.

Not the bee drew the correct conclusion: …maybe this is a warning of some kind?

If Orwell didn’t persuade you and the privacy concerns weren’t enough is the possibility of being locked out of your home – either by outages or maniacs running Big Tech companies deciding you should be punished – enough to convince you that getting far away from Big Tech’s wireless devices is an urgent priority?