Smart bed company reveals new ‘outage mode’ after AWS crash leaves sleepers with uncomfortable night’s rest

A person holds a pillow over their head while lying in bed in this undated file image. (Ron Lach via Pexels)

Eight Sleep, a smart bed that uses advanced technology and cloud connectivity to personalize users’ sleep experience, is among the many businesses affected by Monday’s Amazon Web Services outage.

The Company has since rolled out an “outage mode” solution to accommodate for users who reported being unable to adjust the sweltering temperature and awkward position of their beds.

On Monday, users of Eight Sleep’s “Pod” mattress toppers – a near $2,000, three-layer mattress, that according to the company can be customized to “achieve the perfect mix of temperature control and comfort”- took to X and Reddit to voice their frustrations.

“I need to change the alarm in the morning, but the app won’t open. Tried restarting and even tried logging in on iPad, and won’t log in,” a Reddit User shared. “I feel like I’m held hostage to their app not working. I have no way to change the alarm now. Wtf?”

Another Sleep Eight user shared that their “girlfriend’s side of the bed set itself to 110 f and won’t turn down. Nightmare.”

CEO of Eight Sleep Matteo Franceschetti acknowledged the frustrations in an X post Monday evening.

“That is not the experience we want to provide, and I want to apologize for it.”

Franceschetti followed the apology with a promise to restore “all the features as AWS comes back,” and a commitment to “outage-proofing your Pod experience,” a process he said Eight Sleep would be working “the whole night+24/7,” to build so that the problem is “fixed extremely quickly.”

The company’s co-founder Alexandra Zatarain told the The Verge that shipments of the new “outage mode” began on Tuesday, allowing “the app to communicate with Pod devices over Bluetooth when cloud infrastructure is unavailable.”

“During an outage, you’ll still be able to open the app, turn the Pod on/off, change temperature levels, and flatten the base,” Zatarain told The Verge.

But the solution did not satisfy many Eight Sleep users who felt the company was negligent.

“The fact that you shipped a BED without including a safe mode for an inevitable outage should disqualify you from further leadership of this company,” one X user responded to Franceschetti. “Sorry man, this is just too much.”

Downdetector, a third-party, real-time problem and outage monitoring system powered by Ookla, said over 4 million users and a thousand companies reported issues due to the outage.

According to previous reporting by CTV News, apps like Reddit, Snapchat, and artificial intelligence startups like Perplexity, all experienced platform disruptions and attributed them to AWS.

Shortly after By 6:01 p.m. ET on Monday, Amazon said, “all AWS services returned to normal operations,” but Eight Sleep reported on their service status page that “some Eight Sleep devices and accounts remain affected.”

As of Tuesday, the company reported that all systems had recovered and “are now operating normally,” but this was not the first time users experienced outage induced problems.

In June, Futurism reported that an Eight Sleep user was “unable to sleep when his AI-controlled mattress,” suffered a “backend outage.”