Did you wake up to unresponsive Ring cameras on Monday? Join the club.
Amazon Web Services went on the fritz early Monday morning, and it took out a slew of online services with it—everything from Apple TV and Hulu to Reddit and Roblox.
Plenty of cloud-connect smart home devices got hit by the outage too, perhaps none so badly as Amazon’s own Ring and Blink cameras, many of which were rendered unresponsive by the glitch.
Down Detector shows huge spikes of problem reports for both Ring and Blink starting around 3 a.m. Eastern time. Alexa was also hit with downtime.
By 9 a.m. Eastern time, AWS appeared to be recovering, and I can now access my Ring Battery Doorbell Plus again.
But earlier this morning, my Ring doorbell was down for the count. Not only was I unable to see a live feed from my doorbell, I also couldn’t access my history of saved video clips at all.
Owners of Blink cameras (Blink is also owned by Amazon) reported widespread issues as well early Monday. One Blink owner said on Reddit (which itself is only now coming back online) their Blink cameras missed the activity of a would-be arsonist who tried to set fire to their home.
Now that AWS seems to be coming back, I can see my Ring video history again, but it’s not clear how much—if any—activity my Ring doorbell may have missed. It did capture a few events starting at 6:30 a.m. this morning (roughly three hours after the outage began), but there’s nothing before then until Sunday evening, which is unusual. Maybe nothing did happen, but I’ll never know.
Amazon Web Services underpins many of the world’s biggest internet services, and when it goes down, it takes plenty of online providers with it, with cloud-based smart home services being among the most vulnerable.
One way around such online outages for smart home users is employing devices that run locally. Indeed, there are plenty of security cameras that offer local storage, with both Ring and Blink boasting their own local solutions. The Ring Alarm Pro, for example, lets you store event videos on a MicroSD card, while the Blink Sync Module XR does the local storage trick, too.
Of course, you may not be able to access locally stored videos during a major internet outage if your security cam’s app refuses to work. Some Ring camera users, for instance, reported being unable to log into their Ring accounts during the AWS outage; personally, my Ring app stayed logged into my account, even if it couldn’t tap into my cloud video history.
Meanwhile, other smart home brands appeared unaffected by the AWS issues; my Hue lights kept going, as did my Tapo and Wyze security cameras, both of which employ local video storage. My iRobot Roomba van ran on schedule, as did my Roborock vac and mop.
Those smart services that leverage Amazon Web Services more heavily, however, would be prudent to consider backup plans for those occasions when AWS does go down. It doesn’t happen that often, but when it does, watch out.
This news story is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best security cameras.
