Why Local Control Matters More Than Ever

Did you try and tell Alexa to run your morning smart home routine, only to find that nothing responded? With a major internet outage, many smart home products simply stopped working, proving that local control of your devices is more important now than ever before.

The Internet Is Notoriously Unreliable

If you tried to access the internet on Monday, then there’s a good chance you ran into some issues. Amazon Web Services (AWS) was down, causing internet issues for a vast majority of the day.

This outage was just one in a string of several outages in 2025 that brought the internet to its knees. AWS has gone down a handful of times this year, and Cloudflare has also suffered outages in the same timeframe.

The internet itself is really just a handful of services, and when one goes down, all the services that rely on that primary platform also go down. An example is Asana, a piece of software that is used heavily among the How-To Geek team.

When AWS went down, very few people on the team could access Asana to view any of the data we have there. Pinterest suffered outages, Fortnite was down, even ordering on Amazon was messed up for some users.

The internet just isn’t as reliable as we think it is. While most services boast a 99.99999% uptime (and often hold up to it), when things break, they break badly. But, internet services aren’t the only casualty here. Smart home platforms also rely on AWS and other services just the same.

Smart Home Devices Are Susceptible to Platform Outages

Because of how easy AWS (and other cloud services providers that rely on AWS) is to use, many smart home platforms utilize the service. Of course, Amazon’s own Alexa and Ring ecosystems are run on AWS, but there are quite a few other manufacturers that rely on Amazon’s backend web services.

As such, when AWS goes down, all the services that rely on the platform go down too—smart home devices included. This means that there were many who tried to use Alexa or Ring devices on Monday that simply couldn’t access them.

According to Amazon in 2023, over 270 million IoT device connections were managed by AWS daily. Two years later, I can only imagine what that number is. That just goes to show how many IoT devices AWS handles, though, which also shows how many IoT devices stop working when AWS goes down.

Local Control Never Goes Down

While AWS (and any other cloud-based platform) is susceptible to internet outages, locally-controlled smart home devices are always accessible so long as your network is online.

What’s a locally-controlled smart home device? Well, it’s a device that receives its instructions locally instead of from a cloud relay. Most smart home devices use the cloud as their default control method. You might issue a command to a Wi-Fi smart bulb from your iPhone which is on the same Wi-Fi network, but chances are that request is being set to the cloud first and then back to your smart home device.

With a locally-controlled device, the command is sent right from your phone to the device—no cloud middle man required. This is actually easier than you might think to set up.

Home Assistant offers fully offline and local control of many smart home devices. It’s actually a pretty great setup, and has more benefits than just working when AWS goes down. When using Home Assistant to control your smart home devices, you can actually build out a more secure network as you’re able to put a stop to all the outgoing traffic to remote servers.

For me, locally-controlled smart home gear beats cloud-controlled any day of the week. Especially on a Monday when AWS decides to stop working.

The Best Setup Has Both Local and Cloud Integrations

While local control is fantastic, and almost necessary in the day we live in, cloud integrations also play a key role. Even Home Assistant can’t offer remote access to your smart home devices without some form of cloud backend. At home, you can use Home Assistant without any form of an external network connection. Once you leave the house, however, you’ll need the cloud to remotely control your devices.

That’s why I think the best smart home setup marries local and cloud control. Local control for when you’re home, and cloud control for when you’re away. I have remotely accessed my smart home numerous times to check a camera’s feed, or to make sure my front door was locked when I left.

However, I don’t like to rely on cloud control for all of my smart home gear. I run just about every smart home device in my house through Home Assistant and into HomeKit. Devices that aren’t integrated through Home Assistant are native in HomeKit, which does offer basic offline control for most smart home products.

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If you want the most reliable smart home out there, the cloud simply can’t be a key component of your setup. Days like today proved that cloud-based smart home gear is just one outage away from not working at all. Meanwhile, locally-controlled devices never stopped working when AWS went down.

Take this as a sign to migrate your smart home devices to a locally-controlled Home Assistant server and avoid future downtime.