There's way too much stuff that relies on internet access. If I'm at home, and my washing machine (which is also at home) wants to tell me when it's done, why does that need to use the internet?

I try to stick to Zigbee or Z-wave devices where possible, since they're guaranteed to be local-only. If I need access when I'm away from home, I connect with a VPN to access Home Assistant.

there were reports of roombas not getting up because us-east-1 was down, don't be so surprised

They don’t rely on the server to sound an already scheduled alarm but they do rely on the server to set the next one for a repeating alarm.

A frustrating number of devices rely on cloud connectivity for astoundingly rudimentary tasks.

I was once at a friend’s house for a game night and it was really cold; everyone was under blankets. I asked to turn up the heat and they said, “The internet is down, so the heat doesn’t work.” 🤯

I have home assistant(no internet needed) turn in the light from off to dim to bright over 5 mins. Such a nicer way to wake up than an alarm.

Not sure why you're confused, but alarm clocks still exist too 😉

There have been a few times my phone has had an update and didn't load in, thus not triggering the alarm. I still use my phone, but I have a backup 'dumb alarm'

Works (again?) for me.

cross-region failovers are a thing, but they're expensive to maintain so not everyone does it. I am kinda surprised one region failure had this much impact though

it's us-east-1 that's down, which is the one region with all the AWS services that aren't easy to replicate, like DynamoDB, a major database service used by so so many companies out there. Its an all eggs in one basket kind of scenario. If it was any other region, we'd be fine.

You can get very fancy new alarm clocks that don't need internet, skill issue. I'm convinced consumer grade IoT tech is some kind of irrational boomer exhibitionism thing

It was only the one AWS region that went down, us-east-1. Unfortunately that's the big kahuna. But they've got regions and availability zones around the globe. The services that went down due to the outage need to get some cross-region redundancy happening, but that's the kind of thing that's never a priority until the moment you need it.