The Case for Orbit20: Amazon AWS web outage breaks vacuums and doorbells

An outage with Amazon's web infrastructure on November 26, 2020 left smart-home enthusiasts unable to use basic household items.

Amazon Web Services is a huge part of the company's business and the backbone of the internet's most popular sites and services. And a widespread US outage late on Wednesday disrupted many of those services.

Aside from breaking a large chunk of the Internet, even Robot vacuums and smart doorbells suddenly stopped working in people's homes.

Orbit20 provides a failsafe for company's to maintain their services, apps and websites in case of a major ground-based server outage as experienced by Amazon.

More Widespread Problem than Realized

"I... can't vacuum... because US-east-1 [region] is down," read one popular tweet, from LinkedIn's top information security official, Geoff Belknap.

"Welcome to the future," replied another user.

The iRobot company, makers of the popular Roomba robot vacuum, acknowledged the widespread problem.

"An Amazon AWS outage is currently impacting our iRobot Home App," it said.

"Please know that our team is aware and monitoring the situation and hope to get the app back online soon."

As more devices are Internet connected, Orbit20's suite of products become even more important for reliable service. No matter how much uptime gurantees are provided, it's always good to have a fallback.

‍

With Orbit20 IoT Your Roomba keeps running and your doorbells keep ringing, even if Amazon is down.

Roombas can be used without an internet connection, by pushing a button on the device. However, connected services are used to keep it within a specific room and to remotely activate or schedule cleaning, which is how many owners use the robot. Even owners of Amazon's own Ring smart doorbells also suddenly found the device no longer worked at all.

Orbit20 IoT and Orbit20 Cache help companies keep their consumer devices running, protecting important revenues and reducing customer service costs due to system outages.

The AWS outage also hit other software, including Photoshop-maker Adobe and the Washington Post newspaper - which is owned by Amazon boss Jeff Bezos. Systems like Orbit20's Compute and RDB would have prevented this type of outage.

Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-55087054

‍