AWS: Amazon web outage breaks vacuums and doorbells (opens in new tab)

OK, I get the doorbell thing, video recording and all that. But vacuums? What on Earth could vaccum do with AWS? Calculate the summary length of your vacuuming sessions as a percentage of distance to the Moon? Have a customized ringtones (or should it be sucktones?) for the engine? Have a dance pattern so you could waltz with it if you pat $49.95? Seriously, what does a vacuum do with AWS?

This is why I don't want IoT. Most new robot-vacuums can't even run the schedule if they are disconnected. But even if they can you sure as hell can't change it if the service goes down (or turns off).

I want to know that sparing physical issues, the products I buy will keep working. Not because the vendor decided that it is no longer worth supporting. I purposely bought a couple-generation old vacuum for this reason.

This outage should sever a wake up call for how useless your "smart" devices will be in a couple of years when the company decides that keeping them working is no longer worth it.

The inability for air-gaped devices to catch malware is a nice added benefit.

Stunned that a Ring doorbell doesn't have a fallback mode that at least "Rings" the bell. I wonder if that's a deliberate design, or some oversight/side-effect that happened after V1.

And this is one of the reasons I'm wary of all these IoT linkings. We see it in cars, vacuum cleaners, fridges, doorbells and thermostats. Some folks see it as a way to market new items and increase functionality, I see it as a vector of malware and the opportunity to hold items hostage until a fee (subscription or update fee) is paid.

Ironically, some Xiaomi vacuum robots are possibly the only cloud-free vacuums, once you root them and install Valetudo:

https://github.com/Hypfer/Valetudo#readme

Ah yes, the Internet of broken Things :)

Yesterday it was smart their smart plugs, I had just put up my Xmas lights and decided to control them using a smart plug from an outlet in my crawlspace.

I spent half the day crawling down there and pressing the button to connect them before finding a reddit thread showing that several other people were having same issue.

Around midnight the plugs were back online.

During the outage today, my Alexa’s were streaming music. When I said, “Alexa”, they went right into reporting that there was an issue. I couldn’t even issue an “Alexa, stop”. Seemed.... dumb.

heroku connected to amazon, it is also affected.