No offline mode? AWS downtime took out smart beds, which overheated or got stuck at odd angles

Amazon's big server outage demonstrated just how many services and products rely on AWS, with all sorts of weird side-effects therein - including smart beds going seriously awry.

Dexerto reports (via TechRadar) that Amazon Web Services going down at the start of this week meant that Eight Sleep's 'Pod' mattress covers, which have a matching base in the highest-end model, went badly wrong.

The AWS downtime meant the app for these smart beds became non-functional, as there's no backup offline mode for controlling the mattress or bed base.

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Eight Sleep relies on the cloud to process the owner's biometric data for sleep and health tracking, and to control the heating and cooling of the mattress. However, as online connectivity is required to control the mattress in any respect, the beds were left stuck in their last setting before the outage.

This meant some beds overheated, or the cooling didn't work, or the base was stuck in a weird position at an incline (like a propped up reading mode) - all of which would have made sleeping difficult to impossible for many Pod owners.

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As you can see in the post on X above, the CEO of Eight Sleep posted to apologize for the problems caused, and noted that the company is currently "outage-proofing your Pod experience" and that this work would be going on 24/7 until it's done. So, this shouldn't happen again, though we haven't yet had an update confirming that the necessary work has actually been completed. This will be the implementation of an offline mode, so the Pod can still be given commands when it can't hook up to Amazon's servers.

This is a scenario that you'd imagine Eight Sleep might have thought about and pre-empted, but apparently not. Which seems to be a not-so-smart move for a smart bed maker, to say the least.

The basic pod cover (that fits over your mattress) and hub unit starts from $2,000 in the US (or AU$4,000 in Australia), and it's a lot more for the base plus mattress - so these 'ultimate sleep fitness machines' as the company bills them are seriously pricey pieces of smart kit. You wouldn't really expect to encounter such an oversight in the way the tech works, frankly.

Amazon's downtime on Monday caused a lot of trouble, of course, with some unexpected dominoes falling, and that included the Starbucks app going down. Even my local supermarket's app was affected, leaving me unable to choose my weekly money-off discounts - the effects were surprisingly wide reaching.