Smart Light Bulbs and Cloud Dependence: An IoT Outage Story

Automatically transcribed from the original recording. Small transcription errors may remain.

This is why you should avoid smart devices like these seeing LED lights in your home or place of business. Number one, to change the color or dim their light, you have to use their proprietary app, which connects to their server. That's right. If their server goes down, you have lost control of your lights. This actually just happened to all of their customers, including myself, over a span of 48 hours. Many on Twitter who dimmed their light to the lowest setting before the outage were left in the dark. Number two, this requirement to have a light bulb that connects to an external server is not only stupid and unnecessary, but introduces your home to numerous security risks. And therefore, it's highly recommended you always put your smart devices on a guest network rather than the same network as your computer and security cameras. Number three, should the company go out of business, decide to no longer support the app, or Apple decides to drop the app, you are left with a light bulb that is as useless as its burnt out predecessor. Number four, this is not the first time this has happened where SingLED's app has acted up. At one point, they were doing push notifications with ads and forced advertisements when opening the app every time you wanted to adjust your lights. They quickly reversed direction after their customers were outraged. So before getting that smart device, ask yourself if the old way is better in a time of need and is the product you are buying well thought out?