Can HA communicate with Etekcity WiFi outlets directly?

OR, does HA have to go out to the cloud and the Etekcity server to control the outlets?

The reason I am moving away from Smarthings and going to HA is to be self sufficient.
I don’t like the fact that if the internet is down I lose some/all of my automation control capability.

Thanks in advance for any information you can provide.