The AWS Outage Bricked People’s $2,700 Smartbeds

Hey there, Joseph here bringing you a story from our regular contributor Matthew Gault. Wow, a smartbed that can record your sleep data, turn up the heat, or cooldown, when needed? All via an app? I'm sure that sounds great to some people. It's not great when AWS goes down and your bed is stuck in a weird position and it won't stop getting hot. This is what happens when we put everything, even beds, online. Definitely read below for some of the quotes from smartbed users.

Sleepers snoozing in Eight Sleep smartbeds had a bad night on Monday when a major outage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) caused their beds to malfunction. Some were left with the bed’s heat blasting, others were left in a sitting position and unable to recline. One woman said her bed went haywire and she had to unplug it from the wall.

At around 3 a.m. ET on Monday morning the US-EAST-1 AWS cluster went down and screwed up internet connected services across the planet. Customers for the banks Lloyds and Halifax couldn’t access their accounts. United Airlines check-ins stopped functioning. And people who rest in Eight Sleep beds awoke to find their mattresses had turned against them.

An Eight Sleep bed is a smart bed that starts at $2,700. Users provide their own mattress and Eight Sleep sells them a mattress cover and a “Pod” that acts as the brain of the system. If customers want to spend a few thousand more, they can get a base that adjusts the position of the mattress, provides biometric sleeping data, and heats and cools the sleeper. Customers must also subscribe to a service for Eight Sleep, which ranges from $17 to $33 a month.

Eight Sleep runs on the cloud and when the servers go down or the customer’s internet goes out it bricks the bed. There’s no offline mode. Customers have complained about the lack of an offline mode for a while, but the AWS outage focused their rage.

“So apparently, when my internet goes down, my bed decides to go on strike too. A quick outage, and boom—no change in sleep position available, not even with manual taps,” one customer on r/eightsleep said. “Maybe consider giving people a grace period before their $5,000 bed locks them into the world’s most ergonomic sitting position. AWS attack or Internet down for a few hours should not brick my bed.”

“Cloud only is unacceptable,” said another. “It’s 2025 there is no reason an internet or AWS server outage should impact your entire customer base's sleep—especially given the price tag of your product. Need EightSleep’s product team to opine here, your customer base demands it!”

“My pod is at +5 and I am sweating cuz I can’t turn it down or off,” said one comment.

Eight Sleep CEO Matteo Franceschetti apologized for the restless night in a statement posted to X. “The AWS outage has impacted some of our users since last night, disrupting their sleep. That is not the experience we want to provide and I want to apologize for it,” he said. He added that the company was restoring the bed’s features as AWS came back online and promised to outage-proof the Pods.

“Mine is still not working—it went super haywire and still seems to be turning on and off randomly with the inability to stop or control it. I had to unplug it,” ESPN host Victoria Arlen said on X, replying to Franceschetti. “I tried to get it going again and it’s still uncontrollable with the system turning on and off.”

“Would be great if my bed wasn’t stuck in an inclined position due to an AWS outage. Cmon now,” @Brandon25774008 said on X.

The truth is that so long as Eight Sleep beds have to communicate with a server to function, they’re always in danger of dying. That point of failure means the beds could go out at any time leaving the people who paid $5,000 for a fancy bed with little recourse. And, of course, no company lasts forever.

“When ES eventually goes bust, our pods will be bricked,” one Redditor said. “The fact that the pods cannot be controlled when you don’t have the internet is diabolical. I wish I knew this before purchasing. This basically means in the possibly near future, all of our pods will be bricked […] ES need to get their heads out of their ass and for once do a pro customer change and introduce an ‘offline’ mode where we can connect to the pod directly and at the very least change the temperature. It has wifi, it can make its own SSID, just make it work ES.”

Pro-active ES users have already found one solution: jailbreak the Pod. The ES sub is—at a minimum—$200 a year, the Pod uploads multiple GBs of telemetry data to ES servers every month, and when the internet goes down the bed dies. If you must own a $5,000 bed that heals and cools you dynamically, shouldn’t you take full control of it?

There’s an active Discord and a Github for a group of Eight Sleep snoozers who’ve decided to do just that. According to the GitHub, the jailbreak “allows complete control of device WITHOUT requiring internet access. If you lose internet, your pod WILL NOT turn off, it will continue working!”

Data centers are vulnerable. Server clusters go down. As long as there is a single point of failure and your device is commuting back to a network out of your control, it’s a risk. We have allowed tech companies to mediate the most basic functions of our lives, from cooking to travel to sleep. The AWS and ES outage is a stark reminder that we should do what we can to limit the control these tech companies have over our lives.  

“I’m continuously horrified that I inextricably linked my sleep and therefore health to a cloud provider’s reliability,” one person said in the comments on Reddit.