Did you sleep well the night of October 19-20? This is certainly not the case for Amazon, whose remote (cloud) computing subsidiary, Amazon Web Services, suffered a massive blackout last Monday at 9:11 French time, or at 3:11 in the United States.
Other people also had a bad night because of this global disruption, because in addition to social networks, online games and even banks, the blackout also affected connected beds. More precisely, those from the company Eight Sleep, reports the site 404 Media.
Sold from 2,849 euros (price to which a subscription is added), this connected bed consists of a mattress protector and a “Pod” that acts as the brain of the system. It allows, through an application, to customize the temperature, elevation and alarm on both sides to provide a good night’s sleep. But it encountered problems on the night of October 20 due to the AWS outage.
Temperature, position… Uncontrollable beds
Operating in the cloud and lacking an offline mode (much to the dismay of users), Eight Sleep’s connected beds were no longer able to respond to their owners’ requests. Some were sitting without being able to tilt the bed, while others faced the heat without being able to lower it.
“My pod is +5 and I’m sweating because I can’t get down [la température] or turn off [le lit]”one of them lamented.
“The cloud alone is unacceptable. It’s 2025, there is no reason for an Internet or AWS server outage to affect the sleep of all your customers, especially given the price of your product,” criticized another.
Faced with these problems and criticism, Eight Sleep CEO Matteo Franceschetti apologized to X and promised to prevent a similar incident from happening again by protecting the Pods from outages. “We will work this afternoon, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, until we achieve it,” he said on the afternoon of October 20.
And it seems that the company has kept its promise. An Eight Sleep spokesperson announced to The Verge that the company launched a “fail mode” on October 21. It would allow the app to communicate with the Pod via Bluetooth when cloud infrastructure is unavailable, so users can still change the temperature or even turn off the device.
Source: BFM TV
