- Amazon services such as the popular voice assistant Alexa and Ring smart-doorbell unit were down, leaving some people locked out of their homes
- Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners also went offline
- Amazon and all of its services crashed across the globe for seven hours on Tuesday due to a major cloud services outage
- A source told DailyMail.com that the cause of the outbreak was a power failure in Virginia and not a malicious hacking
- Thousands of Americans reported being left without working Roomba smart vacuums, fridges, or even lights in their homes
- People reported their smart lightbulbs stopped responding to voice commands during the outage and their Christmas tree lights would not turn on
Amazon’s cloud outage saw Alexa’s, Roomba robot vacuum cleaners and Ring doorbells go down – leaving some users trapped outside their own ‘smart’ homes.
Some Ring customers said that they spent time rebooting or reinstalling their apps and devices before finding out about the outage on social media.
Many rely on a phone app to enter their homes, rather than a code that can also be used, with those that had forgotten the latter stuck outside their own homes as Ring doorbells went down.
‘So how can I get into my home? I don’t remember the code. I always use my app,’ one person tweeted.
‘I’ve reset mine and tried to make a new account I’m completely locked out!! Not what we need right by Christmas. Stuck with a broken piece of plastic,’ another person tweeted.
This was after Amazon and all of its services crashed across the globe for seven hours on Tuesday due to a major cloud services outage.
A source told DailyMail.com that the cause of the outbreak was a power failure in Virginia and not a malicious hacking.
Amazon said the outage was likely due to issues related to application programming interface (API), which is a set of protocols for building and integrating application software.
Thousands of Americans reported being left without working Roomba smart vacuums, fridges, or even lights in their homes as smart lightbulbs stopped responding to voice commands during the outage, Bloomberg reported.
Some Amazon customers said they weren’t able to turn on their Christmas lights either, putting a damper on the holiday season.
The outage was a reminder for some of the cons of having a ‘smart home’ that relies on internet access and on a single company. Some Twitter users gloated that their ‘dumb’ homes without internet-connected gadgets were working as well as ever during the outage.
