NEW YORK (BLOOMBERG) – The outage at Amazon.com’s cloud-computing arm left thousands of people in the United States 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 10am Eastern time on Tuesday (Dec 7), upended package deliveries, took down major streaming services, and prevented people from getting into Walt Disney’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.
