OnWednesday, May 31, 2023, I finally regained access to my Amazon account after an unexpected and unwarranted lockout that lasted nearly a week, from Thursday, May 25. This wasn’t just a simple inconvenience, though. I have a smart home, and my primary means of interfacing with all the devices and automations is through Amazon Echo devices via Alexa. This incident left me with a house full of unresponsive devices, a silent Alexa, and a lot of questions.
I do want to note that since I host many of my own local services and many devices are local only. I only lost the ability to use Alexa. My home was fine as I just used Siri or locally hosted dashboard if I wanted to change a light’s color or something of that nature. However, this was a huge over reaction and I’m hoping we as consumers get more protections and will truly be able to own our devices.