More than a few folks got back from lunch today to find that their lightbulbs weren’t working.

They couldn’t play that post-lunch smooth jazz …

Nor could they turn off their …oven.

Or … open their garage.

Amazon’s s3, a cloud-based storage service that powers many gadgets, most of the Internet of Things, and a very large number of websites ….was down.

A fail whale that lands not just online, but … in your home.

This awkward moment was brought to you by the fact that all cloud-based IoT running on top of Amazon depend on both an internet connection as well as operational servers. This debacle could have been avoided if connected devices could run offline, and weren’t dependent on the cloud.

So what’s a cloud-based IoT like?

Right now if you have a cloud-based IoT lightbulb, every time you switch it on, the control hub sends a request to the cloud, gets a response back, and then sends a radio signal to the lightbulb. It travels thousands of miles, sending data around, just to turn on a light that’s a few meters away. That’s the modern equivalent of having to call your electricity provider each time you want to turn your physical lights on or off!

So is everyone with connected lightbulbs somehow run through s3 just … in the dark right now? No cloud. No light. That’s how fragile we’re becoming with all these unnecessary layers of complexity.

A connected home on the cloud quickly evaporates when the cloud goes down.

Having a connected home that runs on a cloud server is akin to having a lock on your door and being forced by a corporation to hand over the key.

What are the chances that this corporation will make it all the way to your house, turn the key and …turn your lights off permanently? The chances are small. But still — you shouldn’t be forced to hand over the keys.

Today’s events definitely opened our eyes to what a dependency on cloud services means to our lives. It showed us how vulnerable we have become.

We’re in the thick of an issue with cloud-based IoT that’s also wildly solvable.