How Amazon outage left smart homes not so smart after all

An Amazon Ring sign is shown as a security warning at the entrance to a residential home in Encinitas, California, US. Affected Amazon services included the voice assistant Alexa and Ring smart-doorbell unit, causing many irate device users to tweet their frustrations to Ring’s official account. — Reuters

The outage at Amazon.com Inc’s cloud-computing arm left thousands of people in the US 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 Tuesday, upended package deliveries, took down major streaming services, and prevented people from getting into Walt Disney Co’s parks.