The big Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage on October 20 turned into a sleepless night for owners of Eight Sleep’s two-grand Pod smart beds. The cloud-connected mattresses suddenly lost functionality, overheated, and in some cases, got stuck upright.
Everything began falling apart around when AWS started throwing errors all over the world. By morning, Downdetector had logged over eight million outage reports in the US alone, affecting everything from banking apps to games. But nothing quite tops the inability to use your own bed.
Because Eight Sleep’s products rely entirely on cloud connectivity, and there was no offline mode, users lost the ability to change the temperature and position of their mattress when AWS went dark.
As you can imagine, frustrated owners flooded social media with complaints, so much so that Eight Sleep has now added an Outage Mode. This means you’ll now be able to open the app, turn your Pod on or off, change the temperature levels, and flatten the base in the event of a crisis again.
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This is good news, of course, but it really shouldn’t have taken something like this to consider offline options – especially when users have been complaining about it for a while.
