Smart Homes Experience Glitches with Amazon Crash
Who turned the lights out? Amazon recently experienced a hiccup in their system that disrupted thousands of sites and services.
A lot of issues can occur when you rely on the Internet to make your life easier. Having your entire home operating under one service might seem like a futuristic perk, but we have yet to arrive at a perfect smart home. This was proven true in February, when many Amazon cloud customers were left without Internet, light, or knowledge of why this fault occurred. In addition to blackouts, you also need to worry about your smart devices being hacked. Click below to use Anti-Hacking on your mobile device and obtain premium protection:
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The initial problem was with Amazon Web Services, which provides services to thousands of online outlets for business, shopping, entertainment, and more. Customers began to notice that sites were running at a slower pace, which escalated into more widespread outages at a scale not often seen with Internet operations. The glitch caused many users to experience faulty operations on websites and downloading services, as well as basic electric failures such as light switches and power to neighboring devices.
Even Alexa, Amazon’s patented voice command service, had trouble remaining active during the crashes. Other applications and social network sites were unable to function in offline mode, and those with the smartphone apps noticed the slow pace with the most frequency. Instagram, Snapchat, and Groupme are just a few popular modes of communication that could not send or receive anything for a few hours during the crash.
Although few websites crashed completely, the inconvenience of slow Internet caused a ruckus in the eastern U.S. Other companies that use their Amazon cloud base around the world did not experience such delays, but the outage affected outbound actions based in certain areas of the United States. Conversations of more advanced data storage and more spread-out data locations were brought into question, but the issues only persisted for a limited duration.
The general consensus is that Amazon didn’t lose out on major clientele or inconvenience the masses, but this event is worth remembering when delegating control of appliances and services to cloud technology. Especially in homes, you should have a backup circuit breaker or manual power at the ready, in case instances like this happen again. Take heed of how smart homes and devices are operating and divulge problems to respective carriers when they occur.