How did an Amazon glitch leave people literally in the dark?

An outage at cloud provider Amazon Web Services resulted in websites and smart homes failing. Is this the future of our internet-connected lives?

Here's a cautionary tale about the future of the internet: an over three-hour outage in an obscure, if tremendously profitable, wing of online retailer Amazon resulted not only in websites such as Medium and Business Insider failing, but also in people unable to turn on their lights.

This outage affected Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon subsidiary that provides cloud computing services to other businesses. If you've ever been told something is stored or run "in the cloud", the likelihood is that it was in servers owned by Amazon - or by similar services provided by its two main competitors, Microsoft and Google.