The Big Internet Outage Caused Smart Beds to Get Stuck Upright

Wise Brothers——Chattanooga, TN

The Big Internet Outage Caused Smart Beds to Get Stuck Upright

How’s this for ironic?  As you know, a big internet outage caused a bunch of cloud-based apps to crash the other day. Turns out a lot of “smart homes” immediately became DUMB homes.  And here’s the funniest example:  A bunch of people’s smart BEDS got really stupid.

A company called Eight Sleep makes bed frames that tilt, and $2,000 mattress covers that let you dial in the temperature of your bed.  But it all runs on the cloud, and it’s hosted by Amazon Web Services.  (AWS handles 30% of all cloud computing worldwide.)

It ended up being a big issue for Eight Sleep customers on Monday.  Because once AWS went down, it BRICKED their whole smart mattress system. If your bed was in a seated position, you couldn’t make it lie flat . . . you just had to sleep like that, or move to the couch.

The outage happened around 3:00 a.m. Eastern, 12:00 A.M. Pacific.  So a lot of night owls had issues. One guy tweeted at the CEO and said, “[It] would be great if my bed wasn’t stuck in an inclined position.”  Someone in the comments added, “It’s all fun and games until a hacker folds you into a taco.”  (For the record, Amazon says it wasn’t a hack.)

Other customers described issues with their mattress overheating.  One guy said his bed was stuck at nine degrees warmer than the room and compared it to “sleeping in a sauna.” The beds started working again once Amazon’s servers went back online.  The CEO of Eight Sleep said they were working to add an “outage mode” this week, so it doesn’t happen again.

Courtesy of Dextero