Hoping someone in ST support can shed some light on what happened last night? This was the worst outage I have seen in the 6 months that I have owned my V2 Hub. I could not disarm my alarm and had sirens blaring when the wife and my 2 year old came home. To say my 2 year old was scared is and understatement. I have an email from ST that says we have identified the issue, but nothing else.
@nastevens@posborne can you shed some light on what happened? Also, my complete apologies for posting on your 17.12 Firmware update thread. I only posted there as I know you were monitoring, I did not mean to cause a firestorm on that thread, that was my mistake and will be more careful where I post next time.
You should also start a poll on how many veteran ST users have sirens attached to the system and how many have a manual kill switch if they do have one
@posborne and I work with Hub firmware and update related projects, so while I know the gist of what went wrong from company chats, Iād be overstepping to just blindly repeat that. I passed along the request and hopefully we can get someone with first-hand knowledge to comment.
Maybe this willl help: apparently, Alexa has been having problems in the same basic time span. The issues might or might not be relatedā¦ but it seems to me if you want to create havoc nowadays, a good olā ādenial of serviceā attack on various cloud and hosting services might be an easy way to accomplish that.
Do you mean at your own house? Iām not seeing any big spike in reports of Alexa or AWS problems nationwide yesterday. There was a brief regional spike for about 10 minutes in the southeast late yesterday afternoon, but the problem cleared within 15 minutes, and it wasnāt enough to even register on most outage sites.
You can check any of the outage monitoring sites for data.
At my own house, Alexa worked fine all day yesterday (when ST was not in the mix) and we use it all the time, but of course thatās just one datapoint.
I would LOVE to see someone try and DDOS AWS, I would say they could withstand a fair whackā¦I might even go so far to say the might be too big to take down.
Most DDOS mitigation providers actually use a back end like AWS (as well as lots of fancy firewall tricks etc) they must have thousands and thousands of GB of bandwidth, thousands of servers across the globe.
Iām not saying that someone organised couldnāt take down a single part of AWS, maybe a single service but not Alexa and ST, that would be all across the news.
Every time a bar is set like this, someone builds an attack to prove it wrong. Akamai, Paypal, etc.
Since volumetric DDoS became more difficult with mitigations being pushed out to the ācloudā, now itās very common to have DDoS techniques that donāt necessarily rely upon simple consumption of bandwidth.
Resiliency is not just dependent upon AWSās architecture and mitigations, but also the individual appās deployment - such as ST.
AWS Resiliency ā SmartThings Resiliency
In any event, just becuase it hasnāt happened doesnāt mean it canāt or wonāt. I am always willing to bet it can.
Nope, no issues at my house. But as they say, anecdote is not dataā¦ so the mere fact that I did not experience issues does not mean the issues did not exist.
But thanx 4 the reference site. Always good to have info at hand.
2 Likes
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
14
I guess I shouldnāt skew the Poll results, but I guessed right away that Lighting is the number 1 use case!
This is consistent with:
āSmart Lightingā is the main local execution SmartApp.
Amazon Alexaās first skill for SmartThings was entirely for lighting.
Hue, Lutron, and and even GE Link/Wink are entirely or very lighting focused
ActionTiles getting many requests to implement lighting scene controls in our product.
Lighting is also the most easily noticeable problem when there are SmartThings platform or firmware issues. Alarms, garage doors, etc., are a bigger inconvenience, but are āusedā much less often.
There was just a report this week from one of the commercial builders that is now offering āsmart homeā options for their new homes (these are HomeKit-compatible devices that also work with Alexa). I was surprised to see that their number one category was lighting. I had expected it to be thermostats.
But how are people responding to KBās smart home options today? Atalla said adoption is currently between 10 and 30 percent of customers, but that it varies based on the technology. Lighting is the most popular product category, with thermostats and security devices following behind that.
1 Like
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
16
āSchedulingā on thermostats is the #1 automation use case and it has been built-in for decades.
Sureā¦ Light outlets have had timers, night detection and motion detection too, but not for the majority of indoor lights. Simply putā¦ Homes have a lot more lights than thermostats.
Whatās really interesting is the sheer number of people using smartthings either as primary or secondary security. Clearly despite all the noise about it shouldnāt be relied upon, many people including myself use it for this purposeā¦
Secondary is a whole separate issue. Iāve often said that I use SmartThings to provide a notification if rain is expected, the guestroom window is open, and a guest is away. Thatās secondary security, but I absolutely donāt expect it to work all the time, itās just a convenience factor. If we donāt get the notification, it means that when it starts raining somebody has to go in and check that window. So we use it, and weāre glad to have it, but weāre not using it for any use case that requires high reliability.
