Owners of Luxury Smart Beds Literally Lost Sleep Due to AWS Outage

Some owners of the Eight Sleep brand smart beds really lost some sleep over the Amazon Web Services outage on Monday. The outage affected internet platforms such as Roblox, Reddit, Amazon and thousands more, leaving people unable to work and access websites. But one of the more unusual effects of the outage involved the fancy bed accessories.

Eight Sleep manufactures internet-enabled bed accessories, including a temperature-adjusting mattress cover and a base that fits between your frame and mattress, allowing for adjustable angles during sleep. Using AI, the products can also track your sleep habits, respiratory patterns, heart rate and other health data to provide a customized sleeping experience without the need for a wearable device. Customers can pay extra for what's called Autopilot, the pod's AI component, which collects your sleep and health metrics. 

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Like many other companies, Eight Sleep's products use Amazon Web Services. So on Monday, the AWS outage caused problems for customers of the mattress, which costs at least $2,748. 

Some reported on Reddit that they were woken up by their bed suddenly readjusting their preferred sleeping temperatures -- some soaring as high as 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Others say their bed became stuck at an extreme incline. According to The Washington Post, some beds also blinked flashing lights and sounded wake-up alarms.

Eight Sleep CEO Matteo Franceschetti posted on X Monday that Eight Sleep was restoring its system and that the company would outage-proof the products. 

"Our engineers are shipping Backup Mode as of yesterday: a transparent, automatic fallback that lets the Eight Sleep app speak directly to your Pod over Bluetooth when cloud infrastructure is unavailable," Alexandra Zatarain, Eight Sleep co-founder and vice-president of marketing, told CNET.

Backup Mode, she says, lets customers access the app and control their pods and base in the event of an AWS outage, something they couldn't do before. Autopilot will update data stored on the pod while it is offline.