Your lights automatically flipping on when you walk in the door. Checking who's at the front door without getting up off the couch. Starting your coffee before you get out of bed. 

There's a reason the smart home industry is forecasted to become a multibillion-dollar industry over the next several years. Sheer convenience aside, smart home gadgets make us feel like we're living in the future. Until they don't. 

SEE ALSO: Your smart fridge is about to make our IoT security nightmare so much worse

Amazon's lengthy AWS outage Tuesday was a stark reminder of just how much farther we have to go to realize the seamless Jetsons-esque future gadget-makers so desperately want us to buy into. The hours-long disruption took down much of the internet, crippling day-to-day activities for many who rely on AWS-backed services, like Slack and Trello, to do their jobs.

But for smart home enthusiasts, the outage also exposed the fact that our lights and doorbells and other gadgets have (yet another) major weakness. By relying on AWS and other cloud services for core functionality, the devices that are supposed to make our lives easier can all too easily be rendered useless. 

As people flooded Twitter to complain about Slack and other services going down, others began to notice that their connected devices were also failing in the wake of the AWS disruption. One service affected by the AWS outage was automation site IFTTT, whose "recipes" power a huge number of connected devices. 

To read the full article go to mashable.