Aws Outage Turned Smart Homes Into Dumb Boxes – And Sysadmins Into Therapists

When Amazon’s cloud face-planted on Monday, it didn’t just take down some of the world’s most popular apps – it took down dignity, comfort, and the occasional cat toilet.

The AWS outage saw a long list of services go dark, from Snapchat to Signal, but the real victims were the gadgets that revealed how ludicrously cloud-dependent our creature comforts have become.

Major AWS outage across US-East region breaks half the internet

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One of the standout casualties was EightSleep, the so-called smart mattress that learns your body, adjusts its temperature, tracks your sleep phases, and streams that data back to the cloud for a cool $200 a month.

“My bed is stuck in Relax mode and won’t change,” moaned one user, while another admitted they were “sweating through my sheets because the app’s dead.”

Another exasperated sleeper noted that EightSleep pumps out 16 GB of data a month – an impressive haul to generate while unconscious.

Meanwhile, the automated litter box LitterRobot briefly forgot how to talk to its servers. “LitterRobot was my casualty this time,” wrote one Redditor. “Thankfully it still worked, but couldn’t monitor – which I had alerts set for anyway, so great functional test.” The cats, at least, remained operational.

Elsewhere, SwitchBot owners found their “robot fingers” had lost feeling, and users of Philips Hue bulbs, the supposed gold standard of smart lighting, were left in the dark.

And then there was the bathroom (Internet of Toilets) – or so claimed a Reddit post, complete with a “Bathroom Closed AWS Outage” sign. It was a joke, of course, but in a world where beds, bins, and bulbs need cloud access, who’s to say the the crapper isn’t next?

By the time engineers had traced the chaos back to a DNS snafu, social media had already turned the outage into a full-blown art installation. On Reddit’s r/sysadmin, the thread titled “If you were the AWS server guy after a day like today, what’s the first thing you’re doing when you clock out?” quickly devolved into collective therapy.

“Definitely a ‘drive home with the radio off’ day,” sighed one poster. Another imagined “chatting with the CrowdStrike guy” – a nod to last year’s equally disastrous software snafu. Some went darker: “I’d use my company credit card on cocaine and hookers, because if I’m gonna be fired anyway, I want one hell of a going-out-in-style story.” One fantasized about going full spy thriller: “Turn off my phone, alter my appearance, think about changing my name, hotwire someone else’s car, check into a hotel under an assumed name and deny, deny, deny.”

Others simply acknowledged the endless grind of modern infrastructure work. “lulz. you think these guys get to clock out,” one Redditor wrote.

But the most cutting line came from a commenter who suspected there might not be a “guy” at all anymore: “It’s funny you think it’s a guy and not a straight AI production code push with AI code review.”

Maybe that’s the problem. As The Register noted yesterday, AWS’s outage came amid a wave of brain drain inside Amazon’s cloud division – the kind of slow leak that makes you wonder who’s really left to flip the switch when the bots break the internet.

It’s easy to laugh, but the outage was also a reminder of how fragile our “smart” world really is. The EightSleep became a glorified heating pad, the LitterRobot a luxury scoop, the Hue bulbs a collection of dumb glass, and Alexa a silent witness to it all.

As one weary Redditor put it: “We always joke about putting everything in the cloud. Today the cloud put everything on hold.” ®

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