Amazon’s AWS outage messed up my Christmas lights — but there’s a solution on the way

Amazon's AWS outage messed upward my Christmas lights — but there'southward a solution on the way

Close up of AWS sign at their offices in SOMA district

(Prototype credit: Sundry Photography | Shutterstock)

Twice now in equally many weeks, in that location'due south been an Amazon Web Services outage, which caused a number of sites and services — including Twitch, Disney Plus, and RIng — to but end working. The outage affected my firm in one particular way: My Christmas lights didn't turn on.

Because of how I'k using smart plugs to control my Christmas lights, I rely on a combination of Alexa and smart plugs to schedule when my lights plough on and off. But when Alexa and AWS are not working properly, the smart plugs didn't become the appropriate command to turn on at dusk. The result: My house was lacking some serious Christmas spirit.

The outage also affected other services in surprising ways.

Attending Litter-Robot friends! 🚨 Our cloud provider, Amazon Web Services (AWS), has an ongoing outage. Your Litter-Robot and Feeder-Robot volition go along to work in offline manner! 🙂 (i/iv) film.twitter.com/qh55RvJfU3December fifteen, 2021

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All the same, at that place's a solution on the horizon.

Next twelvemonth, a new smart dwelling standard called Affair volition finally arrive, and, more than importantly, the first devices that tin can use Matter will be bachelor equally well. Matter is an IP-based protocol that, in theory, volition get in much easier for the best smart home devices to work with just almost whatever platform, whether y'all utilize Alexa, Google Assistant, or HomeKit. It also stands to replace the myriad networking standards already out there — virtually specifically Bluetooth, Zigbee, and Z-Wave.

But the one Thing feature that I'm most interested in — insofar as my Christmas lights get — is local control. Correct now, my outdoor smart plugs all take to connect via Wi-Fi to my router to send and receive instructions, and so if something in the cloud goes wrong, then the plugs won't work. Matter-enabled smart plugs, though, would set up a self-healing mesh network, so fifty-fifty if they lost their connection to the cloud, I'd all the same exist able to turn them on and off locally.

Having a local mesh network of smart home devices besides means that your devices will be more secure from exterior intrusions; if your door lock doesn't have to use the cloud to get instructions, that'due south one less avenue for potential hackers to get into your smart abode.

Still, we're still at to the lowest degree vi months before we'll see any Thing-enabled smart home devices. Eve was amid the commencement to announce that its devices would support Matter, merely the company adds that information technology won't happen until June at the earliest, pending the rollout of the concluding Matter specification. And while the major players — Amazon, Google, and Apple tree — have all thrown their back up backside Matter, they haven't said when they're going to update their smart home products to support the new standard. In Google'due south case, the Nest Learning Thermostat won't be supported at all.

I'one thousand hopeful that by the terminate of 2022, there volition be a decent collection of smart home devices that support Matter — after all, I don't desire another web outage to ruin next year'south Christmas!

Michael A. Prospero is the deputy editor at Tom's Guide overseeing the dwelling, smart domicile, drones, and fitness/wearables categories, as well as all buying guides and other evergreen content. When he'southward non testing out the latest running watch, skiing or training for a marathon, he's probably using the latest sous vide automobile or another cooking gadget.