Free Republic

As Cybersecurity Awareness Month comes to a close, it ends having given us all a small glimpse into the potential chaos that awaits us if hackers had their way. A couple of weeks ago, Amazon Web Services suffered a massive outage that took down websites, apps, payment systems, and smart-home devices across the globe. The culprit wasn’t a hack — it was a software automation bug in AWS’s internal DNS management. But that’s exactly what makes it terrifying. A simple misfire in one system cascaded through hospitals, banks, airlines, and retailers in minutes. Now imagine if it hadn’t been an...

The outage at Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud-computing arm left thousands of people in the U.S. without working fridges, roombas and doorbells, highlighting just how reliant people have become on the company as the Internet of Things proliferates across homes. Multiple Ring users even said they weren’t able to get into their homes without access to the phone app, which was down. The outage prompted people to reflect on the pitfalls of having a “smart” home that’s overly dependent on not only the internet, but one company in particular -- while those with “dumb” homes gloated that their fridges and light switches...