Brandon Jackson, a Microsoft site reliability engineer, says an errant report of racist abuse from an Amazon delivery driver led to the suspension of his Amazon account and the consequent inoperability of his Amazon Echo smart home hardware.
Jackson earlier this month published an account of the incident, and yesterday shared a video exploring the issue further.
Jackson says he regained access to his Amazon account on Wednesday, May 31, 2023, after what he characterizes as an unjustified week-long lockout.
This incident left me with a house full of unresponsive devices, a silent Alexa, and a lot of questions
"This wasn’t just a simple inconvenience, though," he wrote. "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."
Jackson's smart home wasn't entirely non-functional during this period. Most of his smart home gear, he said, is self-hosted locally, via Apple HomeKit, and not tied to an Amazon cloud service. He could still interact with some devices through Apple's Siri assistant software.
Jackson attributes the suspension of his Amazon account – which controls his Echo hardware and Alexa software – to an Amazon driver misinterpreting an automated Eufy doorbell audio message.
The incident began, he claims, following the delivery of a package on May 24, 2023.
The next day he found he...
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