https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55087054

An outage with Amazon's web infrastructure 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.

A widespread US outage late on Wednesday disrupted many of those services. Robot vacuums and smart doorbells suddenly stopped working in people's homes.

Widespread problem

"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."

Schedule cleaning

Roombas can be used without an internet connection, by pushing a button on the device. But 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. Owners of Amazon's own Ring smart doorbells also suddenly found the device no longer worked at all. "We are aware of a service interruption impacting Ring," the company said. "We apologise for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience and understanding."

The AWS outage also hit other software, including Photoshop-maker Adobe and the Washington Post newspaper - which is owned by Amazon boss Jeff Bezos. AWS says the problems have now been resolved and all its services are back up and running.