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People Can’t Vacuum Or Use Their Doorbell Because Amazon’s Cloud Servers Are Down

Source: https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2020/11/people-cant-vacuum-or-use-their-doorbell-because-amazons-web-services-cloud-servers-are-down/

by: Cam Wilson | Published: November 26, 2020

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is having problems. And unfortunately for anyone who owned a vacuum or doorbell that relied on AWS, a lot of the so-called ‘smart’ objects are no longer functional.

AWS is the world’s biggest cloud hosting software. In just over a decade, Amazon’s product has essentially become the backbone of the internet.

And early on Thursday morning Australia time, one of its major server centres began to have an issue — not for the first time either.

Soon after people noticed, Amazon acknowledged the problem on its internal dashboard for users.

“We continue to work towards recovery of the issue affecting the Kinesis Data Streams API in the US-EAST-1 Region. We also continue to see an improvement in error rates for Kinesis and several affected services, but expect full recovery to still take up to a few hours,” it read.

Many of the services that you know and love — Adobe cloud software, 1Password, Flickr — have all been having issues because of the outage.

But there were some unexpected issues as well: namely, a lot of people began to notice things that they didn’t know needed cloud computing were actually very reliant on them.

First, people’s beloved vacuum robot Roombas stopped working.

One user tweeted about Amazon in frustration “Some part of AWS is down and apparently it’s screwing up the Roomba,”

Matthew Green @matthew_d_green Some part of AWS is down and apparently it’s screwing up the Roomba. Nov 25 (Twitter)

The company that produces Roombas, iRobot, confirmed they (along with their robot mops) were no longer working.

iRobot @iRobot An Amazon AWS outage is currently impacting our iRobot Home App. Please know that our team is aware and monitoring the situation and hope to get the App back online soon. Thank you for your understanding and patience. Nov 25, 2020 (Twitter)

And next came the doorbells:

“My fucking doorbell doesn’t work because AWS us-east-1 is having issues,” another user tweeted.

Some people even lost control of their Christmas lights!

“Anyone else unable to turn on their Christmas lights because of the AWS outage?” one Twitter user asked.

I guess what we can take from this is: probably not a good idea to have half of the infrastructure of the internet depend on the same company, hey?

Tags: Date-2020-11-26, AmazonWebServices, Internet

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