There have been quite a few big outages throughout 2021. In fact, the year started off with a Slack outage, affecting many employees coming back to their first day back after the holidays. But things got really bad when Facebook Meta suffered a major six-hour outage that left many of its services unusable.
The company apologized to its users, many of whom rely on WhatsApp for communication. But then it happened again... and again. It got to the point that Instagram announced that it was rolling out an "outage alert" feature to warn users of service disruptions.
The Wall Street Journal points out that with the recent AWS outage knocking out many services, including the best Alexa speakers, many people have started thinking about how dependent we are on the cloud and smart devices to do basic tasks. So we want to know if this or recent outages have made you rethink your dependence on the cloud and, more specifically, smart home devices.
WSJ notes how consumers felt like they were thrown back into ancient times by having to manually feed their cats, sweep their floors, and even be stuck talking to other human beings because AWS took down Alexa and other services that rely on its cloud servers.
As comical as that sounds, Jitesh Urbani, IDC's research manager of worldwide device trackers, notes that it does bring up the lack of offline support that many devices have and our seeming dependence on the cloud to make things work.
Hopefully today's #alexa and #RingDoorbell outages will lead to more consumers asking for local control or offline support in their smart home devices. This is one of the few differentiators smaller brands offer but it's often seen as unnecessary by many.Hopefully today's #alexa and #RingDoorbell outages will lead to more consumers asking for local control or offline support in their smart home devices. This is one of the few differentiators smaller brands offer but it's often seen as unnecessary by many.— Jitesh Ubrani (@JiteshUbrani) December 8, 2021December 8, 2021
Comment below on whether or not you think we rely too much on the cloud in our daily lives.
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