These smart beds began roasting their owners during AWS outage

Owners of Eight Sleep smart beds got anything but a good night’s sleep Monday, as the beds began heating up uncontrollably while also getting frozen in position due to Amazon’s worldwide server outage. 

Eight Sleep CEO Matteo Franceschetti took to X to apologize for the malfunctioning “Pod” smart beds, which cost $2,600 and up, and he promised that the company would work “24/7” to “outage-proof” the beds. That fix is rolling out now, the company told TechHive.

“The AWS outage has impacted some of our users since last night, disrupting their sleep,” Franceschetti wrote on X. “That is not the experience we want to provide and I want to apologize for it.” 

Furious Eight Sleep owners vented on Reddit, describing how their smart beds were overheating and stuck in odd positions.” 

“My pod is at +5 [above room temperature] and I am sweating cuz I can’t turn [it] down or off,” one Eight Sleep owner posted on Reddit. 

“Just woke up at 3 a.m. because I was sweating and realized bed wasn’t cooling and couldn’t login to the app,” wrote another user. “The side buttons on my Pod 5 won’t even work to control the temperature.” 

“Would be great if my bed wasn’t stuck in an inclined position due to an AWS outage,” complained yet another user on X. 

Eight Sleep’s “Pod” beds, which can heat all the way up to 110 degrees Fahrenheit on either side of the bed as well as adjust their positions and track your sleep, did eventually come back online as the AWS glitch subsided later in the day Monday. 

Company CEO Franceschetti noting on X that “all devices are currently working, with some experiencing data processing delays.” 

Reached for comment by TechHive, an Eight Sleep spokesperson said the company has just released an “Outage Access” feature that allows the Eight Sleep app to “speak 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 flatted the Base” during future cloud outages.

The AWS-triggered Eight Sleep smart bed snafu was reported earlier by Dextero.  

Monday’s Amazon outage exposed the vulnerability of many cloud-connected smart home devices, some of which went completely inoperative during the AWS crash. 

Amazon’s Ring and Blink security cameras were knocked offline, for example, and there were other reports of smart tech that lost cloud connectivity, rendering them useless. 

Of course, it’s one thing for Ring cameras to go temporarily blind during a cloud outage; it’s quite another for your smart bed to begin overheating or get stuck in an upright position, ruining your night’s sleep.

It’s good to learn Eight Sleep worked quickly to roll out its offline functionality, and hopefully other smart bed makers in the same situation will follow suit.