That floor won’t clean itself… well, quite literally it won’t, especially if the vacuum robot you bought to clean the floor won’t hop off its dock when the servers are down
Users started reporting issues with their Roomba app around midday Friday. The status page for iRobot, the maker of Roomba, identified there were outages with Amazon Web Services. The company said they were working with AWS engineers to get the problem sorted out, though as of reporting this, the issue was still unresolved.
Roomba also tweeted about the issue, saying “some customers may be having issues accessing the iRobot app.”
Server outages happen, and that will of course cause issues with apps that rely on connectivity for most of devices more robust features. The problem is when some users cannot access necessary features at all. One user reported they could no longer stop their Roomba from doing its business as child lock features are only accessible in the app.
In response to Gizmodo’s inquiry, iRobot apologized to the customers for the inconvenience and linked to a video and written instructions about how to manually deactivate child and pet locks.
Other users wrote to Gizmodo that although their Roombas can activate manually by hitting the “Clean” button, their devices are still effectively unusable since they cannot tell the vacuum to only do certain rooms or avoid debris in other parts of the house.
This is just another example of the finicky difficulties employed when electronic devices require an internet connection to access necessary functionality.
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Source: Roomba Users Report App Outages
Robin Edgar
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