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

Some owners of Eight Sleep brand smart beds really lost some sleep over Monday’s Amazon Web Services outage. The outage affected internet platforms such as like Roblox, Reddit, Amazon and thousands more, preventing people from working and accessing websites. But one of the more unusual effects of the outage involved sophisticated bed accessories.

Eight Sleep makes internet-enabled bed accessories, including a temperature-adjustable mattress cover and a base that fits between your frame and mattress, allowing adjustable angles while sleeping. With AI, products can also track your sleeping patterns, breathing patterns and heart rate and other health data to deliver a personalized sleep experience without the need for a wearable device. Customers can pay extra for something called Autopilot, the pod’s AI component, which collects your sleep and health metrics.

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Like many other companies, Eight Sleep 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 awakened by their bed suddenly readjusting their preferred sleeping temperature — some reaching as high as 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Others say their bed got stuck on an extreme slope. According to the Washington Post, some beds also flashed flashing lights and triggered wake-up alarms.

Eight Sleep CEO Matteo Franceschetti posted on Monday that Eight Sleep was restoring its system and that the company would protect the products against outages.

“Our engineers introduced Backup Mode yesterday: a seamless, automatic fallback solution that allows the Eight Sleep app to talk directly to your Pod via Bluetooth when cloud infrastructure is unavailable,” Alexandra Zatarain, Eight Sleep co-founder and vice president of marketing, told CNET.

Backup mode, she says, allows customers to access the application and control their modules and database in the event of an AWS outage, something they couldn’t do before. Autopilot will update the data stored on the pod when it is offline.