Amazon brings new smart-home technologies: vacuums and doorbells

CNI Desk: 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.

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, BBC reported.