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You can turn them off at the socket, the newer ones via Bluetooth, and with the bridge itself. The bridge didn’t work because it is on a separate IOT vlan (and routing between wifi and this vlan didn’t work), and I was too lazy to turn them off one by one.

The nice thing about hue is that they work without an internet connection, which is not a given these days.

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I see, thanks, I imagined (wrongly) that if your Wi-Fi router was down (besides Internet connection), even for a simpler issue, let's say a failed power supply, you were stuck with lights either on or off until you fixed it.

Besides my (personal) skepticism about anything IoT, I feared that in such a setup having a working Wi-Fi was "essential", if there is a failsafe of some kind (like direct bluetooth) it is less bad than I imagined.

In theory you could connect via Ethernet directly to the Hue Bridge and turn the lights off that way, but at that point you can as well fix the other issues.

My main argument for Philips Hue instead of alternatives was that they can be controlled even if AWS or some other networks are down.

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