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Warning: My whole neighborhood went dark when the smart meter network crashed | Tech Doomsday Prep - Free To Speak

Warning: My whole neighborhood went dark when the smart meter network crashed

Was at home in Austin last Tuesday when suddenly every smart device in my house just stopped working. The thermostat locked up, my fridge started beeping, and even the smart lock on my front door wouldnt respond. Turns out the city wide smart grid had a glitch that took down thousands of homes for almost 4 hours. Has anyone else had their house turn into a brick during one of these outages?

3 comments

3 Comments

phoenix_lewis2mo ago

Tbh that "too comfortable" thing is so real. My friend Sara in Dallas had her whole smart home go down during a summer storm last year. Her AC was stuck at 88 degrees in July and she couldn't even open her garage because the opener needed the network to work. She ended up sleeping at my place that night cause her place was basically a hot brick. It's wild how something as simple as a power surge can just turn your house into a useless pile of plastic.

charles6402mo ago

And this is exactly what I mean about how we've quietly baked single points of failure into our whole lives. @phoenix_lewis like yeah the smart home stuff is one thing, but I see this at the grocery store too when their card readers go down and suddenly nobody can buy milk because nobody carries cash anymore. Or my buddy's apartment building that uses an app to let visitors in and the whole system locked up for an hour last week. We traded simple reliability for convenience and now a dead router can stop you from eating dinner or getting into your own house.

sage_moore372mo ago

This is the kind of stuff that makes me wonder if we've gotten TOO comfortable letting tech run everything. My buddy had the exact same thing happen to his whole block last month, and it's scary how quickly normal life just stops. It feels like every single thing in our homes now depends on some central system that can fail at any moment. I just keep thinking about how people used to live without any of this stuff and were totally fine, but now we're all helpless when a glitch happens.