While most of us know Amazon as the definitive place to pick up a water bottle, some fertilizer, and a new thing of batteries, it makes a surprising portion of its revenue with hosting services, keeping the internet up and running. As we have seen numerous times, though, the fundamental structures undergirding the internet are extremely vulnerable, and so when Amazon’s web services went down today, so did numerous websites and services, including Slack, Trello, Quora, and The A.V. Club.
We spent our downtime eating paczki (it’s Fat Tuesday!) and whiteboarding new epithets for Donald Trump, but for anyone who has bought into the idea of an “internet of things,” in which their house is full of internet-connected appliances that all seamlessly communicate with each other, today’s internet disruption turned their life of luxury into a man-versus-machine dystopia. Or, at least, that’s what we envisioned to bide our time. As TechCrunch reported:
Connected lightbulbs, thermostats and other IoT hardware is also being impacted, with many unable to control these devices as a result of the outage.
The popular Twitter account Internet Of Shit had a field day of schadenfreude:
It all recalled the Mr. Robot season two smart home hack, as well as its direct precedent, the weirdly prescient 1999 Disney Channel original movie Smart House, in which Katey Sagal plays a servile hologram in a high-tech home that slowly becomes sentient and takes on the characteristics of an overbearing mother. Also of note is the fact that LeVar Burton directed this movie.
You can view Smart House in its entirety here, assuming the internet is working for you.