Owners of Eight Sleep smart beds had anything but a good night’s sleep on Monday, as the beds began heating up uncontrollably while freezing due to Amazon’s global server outage.
Eight Sleep CEO Matteo Franceschetti took to This patch is currently rolling out, the company told TechHive.
“The AWS outage has affected some of our users since last night, disrupting their sleep,” Franceschetti wrote on X. “This is not the experience we want to provide and I want to apologize for that.”
Furious Eight Sleep owners vented on Reddit, describing how their smart beds were overheating and getting stuck in strange positions.
“My pod is at +5 [above room temperature] and I’m sweating because I can’t turn around [it] down or off,” an Eight Sleep owner posted on Reddit.
“Woke up at 3am because I was sweating and realized the bed wasn’t getting cold and I couldn’t log into the app,” another user wrote. “The side buttons on my Pod 5 don’t even work to control the temperature.”
“It would be great if my bed wasn’t stuck in a tilted position due to an AWS outage,” another user complained on X.
Sleep’s eight “Pod” beds, which can heat up to 110 degrees Fahrenheit on either side of the bed, adjust their position and track your sleep, finally came back online as the AWS problem eased later in the day Monday.
The company’s CEO Franceschetti noted on X that “all devices are currently working, with some experiencing delays in data processing.”
Contacted for comment by TechHive, an Eight Sleep spokesperson said the company just released an “Outage Access” feature that allows the Eight Sleep app to “talk directly to your Pod when cloud infrastructure is unavailable,” meaning users will be able to “open the app, turn the Pod on/off, change temperature levels, and flatten the base” during future outages. of cloud.
The Eight Sleep smart bed issue triggered by AWS was reported earlier by Dextero.
Monday’s Amazon outage exposed the vulnerability of many cloud-connected smart home devices, some of which were rendered completely inoperable during the AWS crash.
Amazon’s Ring and Blink security cameras have been taken offline, for example, and there are other reports of smart technologies losing cloud connectivity, rendering them useless.
Of course, it’s one thing for Ring cameras to go temporarily blind during a cloud outage; It’s another for your smart bed to start overheating or get stuck in an upright position, ruining your night’s sleep.
It’s good to hear that Eight Sleep has worked quickly to roll out its offline functionality, and I hope other smart bed makers in the same situation will follow.
