- Smart bed owners hit by this week’s big AWS outage
- Eight Sleep Pod owners reported overheating and getting stuck upright
- Eight Sleep tells customers it’s “disrupt-proofing your Pod experience”
This week’s big AWS outage had a number of strange effects, but the most unexpected might be the one that affected owners of some smart beds.
As many unfortunate Eight Sleep Pod owners reported, the Amazon Web Services issues, which affected more than 1,000 businesses, left their smart beds overheating and even stuck upright.
One owner (below) said that “it would be great if my bed wasn’t stuck in a tilted position due to an AWS outage.” Meanwhile, another viral post by pioneer Alex Browne (as reported by Dexerto) said that “a backend outage means I’m sleeping in a sauna.”
The root of the problem was that the company’s ‘Pod’, which you can buy as a mattress or as a full bed with foundation, is connected to the internet so it can track your biometrics and monitor the temperature of the mattress. Unfortunately, many owners found this functionality to be double-edged during a major internet outage.
Fortunately, Eight Sleep responded quickly to ensure their smart bed customers didn’t have their sleep interrupted for long.
The company’s CEO, Matteo Franceschetti, said on
The dark side of the smart home
We’ve previously enjoyed Eight Sleep products, such as their Pod 3 case, which our review called “a great sleep aid with brilliant smart heating and cooling functionality.”
But while there are some benefits to having your bed have sleep tracking and heating power, this AWS outage showed that this smart home connectivity is not without its drawbacks.
Let’s be honest, for those of us who have non-smart beds, hearing that an internet outage has left someone’s bed stuck upright is pretty funny. With the AWS outage stressful for many, a little chill of schadenfreude provides some welcome light relief.
The good news is that Eight Sleep is now fixing its smart mattresses and beds to be cut-proof in the future, and right now it looks like the AWS nightmare is over for most of us, too.
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