Why Local Control Matters More Than Ever

Have you tried telling Alexa to run your smart home morning routine, only to find that nothing responds? With a major internet outage, many smart home products simply stopped working, proving that local control of your devices is more important than ever.

The Internet is notoriously unreliable

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

This outage is just one of many outages in 2025 that have brought the internet to its knees. AWS has experienced outages several times this year and Cloudflare has also experienced outages during the same period.

The Internet itself is really just a handful of services, and when one service goes down, all the services that rely on that core platform go down as well. An example is Asana, a software widely used by Practical geek team.

When AWS went down, very few team members could access Asana to view the data we had. Pinterest suffered outages, Fortnite was down, even orders on Amazon were messed up for some users.

The Internet is simply not as reliable as we think. While most services boast 99.99999% uptime (and often stick to it), when things go down, they break badly. But Internet services are not the only victims. Smart home platforms also rely on AWS and other services.

Smart home devices are susceptible to platform outages

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Because of the ease of use of AWS (and other cloud service providers that build on AWS), many smart home platforms use this service. Of course, Amazon’s Alexa and Ring ecosystems run on AWS, but many other manufacturers rely on Amazon’s backend web services.

So when AWS goes down, all services that rely on the platform also go down, including smart home devices. That means many tried to use Alexa or Ring devices on Monday and simply couldn’t access them.

According to Amazon, in 2023, more than 270 million IoT device connections were managed by AWS daily. Two years later, I can only imagine what that number is. This simply shows how many IoT devices AWS manages, which also shows how many IoT devices stop working when AWS goes down.

Local control never fails

Credit: Bertel King / How-To Geek

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

What is a locally controlled smart home device? Well, it’s a device that receives its instructions locally rather than from a cloud relay. Most smart home devices use the cloud as their default control method. You can send a command to a Wi-Fi smart bulb from your iPhone that’s on the same Wi-Fi network, but it’s likely that request will be sent to the cloud first and then sent back to your smart home device.

With a locally controlled device, the order is sent directly from your phone to the device – no cloud intermediaries required. It’s actually easier than you think to set up.

Home Assistant offers local and fully offline control of many smart home devices. This is actually a pretty cool setup that has more benefits than just working when AWS goes down. When you use Home Assistant to control your smart home devices, you can actually create a more secure network because you can stop all outgoing traffic to remote servers.

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

The best setup has both on-premises and cloud integrations

Credit: Hannah Stryker / How-To Geek

While local control is fantastic and almost necessary these days, 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 external network connection. However, once you leave the house, you’ll need the cloud to control your devices remotely.

This is why I think the best smart home setup combines local control and the cloud. Local control when you’re at home and cloud control when you’re away. I’ve remotely accessed my smart home several times to check a camera feed or to make sure my front door was locked when I left.

However, I don’t like relying on cloud control for all my smart home equipment. I use almost every smart device in my home through Home Assistant and HomeKit. Devices that aren’t integrated through Home Assistant are native to HomeKit, which provides basic offline control for most smart home products.

If you want the most reliable smart home on the market, the cloud simply cannot be a key part of your setup. Days like today have proven that cloud-based smart home equipment is just one failure away from working at all. Meanwhile, locally controlled devices never stopped working when AWS went down.

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