Amazon Web Services Outage Causes a Malfunction in Luxury Smart Beds, Trapping Customers With No Offline Controls 

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On Monday, Amazon Web Services faced an outage, causing smart beds from Eight Sleep to malfunction. Some users reported incidents of heat blasting, while others complained about being unable to recline when seated.

The incident took place at around 3 a.m. as the US-EAST-1 AWS cluster crashed and corrupted services connected to the internet across the world. Lloyds and Halifax bank account holders were not able to access their accounts after the sudden crash, and the check-ins of United Airlines stopped.

Manufacturer's Response to Bricked Beds & Customer Remarks

One of the customers, annoyed by the system crash, said, “So apparently, when my internet goes down, my bed decides to go on strike too. A quick outage, and boom—no change in sleep position available, not even with manual taps.” They further added, “Maybe consider giving people a grace period before their $5000 bed locks them into the world’s most ergonomic sitting position.” They also stated, “AWS attack or Internet down for a few hours should not brick my bed.”

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Matteo Franceschetti, the CEO of Eight Sleep, wrote on X apologizing to customers, “The AWS outage has impacted some of our users since last night, disrupting their sleep. That is not the experience we want to provide, and I want to apologize for it.” He also assured the users that their smart beds will soon be outage-proof.

About Eight Sleep’s Smart Bed

Priced at $2,700, the Eight Sleep bed is a smart bed that uses a cover to regulate the temperature of the mattress depending on the need to offer an improved sleep to the user. The users are required to give their own mattress for Eight Sleep to provide them with a mattress cover and a pod. This pod acts like the brain of the whole system.

By spending a few more dollars, users can avail a base that can adjust the mattress position and monitor their biometric sleeping data. The company has also made it mandatory to subscribe to their service, which is priced from $17 to $33. The Eight Sleep smart bed operates on the cloud, and if the servers crash or when the user’s internet connection is lost, the bed’s function is affected.

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An Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage caused cloud-connected smart beds to malfunction, trapping some users in inconvenient positions and leaving the devices inoperable.