Does aaaaaaanyone else find this to be, I don't know, the least little teensy weensy bit concerning?
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.
Others said they weren't able to turn on their Christmas lights.
So, I know we tend to make a fair number of Skynet jokes around here...
....but it turns out, you don't really need Skynet to collapse your civilization! You just need, like, one single company running your entire house. Then when that company experiences an outage, well...
