Yesterday (12/7) when I asked Alexa to turn off the lights in a room, it responded it was having trouble and I should “contact them to see what the problem is”. It did not explain who “they” are. Turns out there was a broadscale outage on AWS in the region I’m living in.
But, Siri was fine and took up the slack. Alexa requires an internet connection to operate, in my case, the Hue bridge. HomeKit apparently does not.
Amazon: “You should totally have global redundancy so that you’re safe from nuclear attacks”
Also Amazon: “One region is down, and now we’re down globally”
My Alexa didn’t drop yesterday at all during the outage.
I’m in Norway, and both Alexa, Audible and the website was down - though not all the time.
I’m sure our reckoning is coming, but hosting our work stuff in us-west-2 Oregon keeps paying off during these outages. 
Our LMS system (Canvas) reported problems.
Maybe this is warning for us all to take the time to set up our old macs scattered around being unused, network them as dummy Webservers, and help promote the move to Web3. Let me offer ten 500 MB hard drive storages at 4 MB/s speed. 
–
JJW
Over in Sweden, Tidal was unable to stream and even load my collection. Everything is connected.
HomePod Siri definitely needs an internet connection. I was reminded of this a few nights ago when Comcast took an unscheduled break during a rainstorm.
The only thing my “ Hey Siri lights on” command got me was “On it. Still working. I’m having problems reaching the internet”.