A major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage on October 20 had the unexpected side effect of causing chaos in bedrooms across the US, as owners of Eight Sleep’s $2,000+ ‘Pod’ mattress covers found their smart beds had no offline mode and were stuck at high temperatures and odd positions in the night.
The outage began around 3 am ET, when AWS reported “increased error rates and latencies” in its US-EAST-1 region. By mid-morning, Downdetector had logged more than eight million reports of disruptions affecting apps, games, and banking platforms.
Eight Sleep’s products rely on cloud connectivity to control temperature and track biometric data. When AWS went down, users lost access to the app that manages its water-cooled coils, leaving them stuck with whatever setting was last active.
Some beds overheated, others stopped cooling altogether, and several users said their devices became completely unresponsive.
This is about as technologically stupid as Tesla door locks that fail to a locked state when power fails. SaaSS: Sleep as a Subscription Service - where do I sign up?!
Having an always connected requirement for your smart bed makes as much sense to me as needing to have an always on connection for a single player game. Besides, whatever happened to building in basic redundancy systems for critical elements?
This is the real engineering fail. Connectivity loss is real. Any machine that heats things up in any way should be designed fail-to-safe, ie. if connectivity is lost, TURN OF THE PERSON BROILER. Luckily all these folks were woken up by being shot bolt upright. Utter fail.
Weird, once IOT seemed to be so awesome, much like the internet, then it got overused and abused. Never mind the complete lack of proper security in most of these IOT hardware…and internet.
