Having read @ThelmaLou’s post, I checked, and my Echo can now play music once again. 
I’m a third-party vendor. If I go to the seller’s dashboard page, I get a message that says “Sorry, there’s nothing new for you here. Stay tuned!”
I won’t worry about it for now, and hopefully will fill an avalanche of orders when the service returns.
When Facebook was down a few weeks ago, my first thought was, “I better go on Facebook and tell everyone - oops.”
In the case of the smart plugs I use, there is a manual on/off switch too. It’s just the convenience factor you lose in a situation like this. Not a real big deal.
Only 7 years ago…
The manual switch obviously still worked. What i didn’t think to check is whether the buttons on the Alexa app on my phone still worked to control things, did you try that? Mine’s back online now, so too late to check. I suspect that it may only be the voice control part that’s lost when it cannot connect real-time to the server.
I didn’t try either. Lights weren’t my issue. I was just replying to I_Love_Me_Vol.I as to the usefulness of smart devices in general.
I was actually thinking of that scene as I posted.
And the “Amazon Web Services takes down huge swathes of the internet, but not SDMB - #3 by Riemann” (okay, that link isn’t quite right) thread wasn’t working. (Now it seems to be up again.)
Amazon still not functioning properly on my phone.
I have seven smart plugs all over the house. Some of them are hard to get to. At bedtime, I tell Alexa to turn them all off at once. During the outage I could still turn them on and off using the Kasa app. (The problem with the outage was that the Echo could not link to Kasa.) So I would have had to turn each one off individually. No real biggie.
One of the smart plugs is for a fan in my bedroom. It’s nice to lie in bed and turn it on and off with a voice command, depending on whether I’m too hot or too cold.
Yes, I tried that. Not working. Alexa was OUT.
You’ve rebooted your phone, right? And your router?
All lights are responding to voice commands now. Amazon Music was up again, then down again, and is now up again.
I think about all the things we did where I used to work that used AWS, and I wonder at the potential chaos.
The phones, yes. Lovely wife is still at work (sic) but we’ll reboot the router when she’s offline.
Several of our vendors seem to be down, including our supplies vendor.
McDonalds app was not able to process orders for several hours today, at least for me, and that’s never happened before.
I have an Amazon order that’s supposed to be delivered today. There’s been no updates since early this morning. Fortunately it’s not urgent.
Was able to go through my day without feeling affected. Then again at work I am on through a government server and/or VPN that is unrelated to AWS and where I generally behave myself insofar as what do I access.
And may I say after reading this thread I’ve been going around the apartment pressing buttons and flipping switches just owning my middle age boomerhood.
I remember when the Trojan Room coffee pot was a big deal.
Aired in March 2008, so thirteen years ago.
How time flies! 
I’m building a database system for a client in the AWS cloud in the US-EAST-1 region, the one that was down, and they were doing some testing yesterday.
Fortunately they got in a couple of hours of testing and were finished by the time it went down.
How hard is it to imagine some truly life-threatening results of over-reliance on this kind of technology, when an outage like this happens? Have any serious horror stories been reported?