AWS Outage Impacted Beds

[Zema Bus]

Many in the US awoke on Monday to see that their online tools weren't working after an Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage. A few were tipped off because their smart mattress malfunctioned.

Those with Eight Sleep smart bed tech found their heated protectors weren't able to change temperature due to the outage. Some found their beds were stuck in an upright position.

On X, Eight Sleep CEO Matteo Franceschetti apologized; it's "not the experience we want to provide," he wrote. The brand is now working on “outage-proofing” for future issues. Franceschetti expects that to be done by the end of the day.

An X user found that his mattress was over nine degrees warmer than desired, and they were unable to reduce the temperature. Another user reported being awoken at 2 a.m. with the bed at 80 degrees Fahrenheit, while another said his bed was "unusable right now because it’s 100% subscription based with no backup plan to let people manually set it when AWS is down."

Franceschetti said all ongoing customer issues were resolved by 10 p.m. ET on Oct. 20.

Eight Sleep's cheapest tech is the Pod 4 mattress cover for $2,649. The newer Pod 5 Core costs $3,049 with both cooling and heating tech that can be set for each side of the bed. It also includes vibrations for alarms and sleep-tracking tech. There's also a top-end Pod 5 Ultra with a mattress designed to relieve back pressure and help reduce snoring for $5,049.

The AWS outage earlier this week took down dozens of services, including Canva, Disney+, HBO Max, Hulu, Lyft, Reddit, Roku, Signal, and Snapchat. Amazon blamed a Domain Name System resolution issue and said it would soon provide a detailed report of what happened.

From pcmag.com

Because why wouldn't you want your bed connected to the Internet

Although I wasn't directly impacted by the AWS outage I discovered that the California county hospital I'm working for uses AWS extensively, there were emails with updates on the outage and all the services impacted. Every time I launched the EMR that day I would first see an message about the status of the outage on EMR components, none of which I use.

[mlangdn]

The bed problems were really funny. I cannot imagine a reason to have some things connected.....

[Grogan]

It's utterly ridiculous, isn't it. Why would anybody want their appliances and such depending on third party services.

THIS:

"unusable right now because it’s 100% subscription based with no backup plan to let people manually set it when AWS is down."

My sister has one of those doorbell camera/intercom thingies that she can access and/or talk to people through her smart phone mobile internet while she's not home. The data goes over the Internet to databases on a third party service. You can't even delete it (only cycle it out of existence by whatever storage quota there is). Now, I'm a bit of a scofflaw so I think of things like this (it's hypothetical for me, I don't currently have any reason to care)... but that could be incriminating evidence, moreover, you have no control of what OTHER people's cameras capture at street level, and the third party service (or the homeowner, by letting them view it) can turn that data over to the police, or be so ordered to by a court. No way, if I were going to have security cameras they'd be WIRED up to a server on premises where their feeds will be stored. Anything like my sister's doorbell camera would be completely useless if Internet is out, OR if someone walks up with a wifi signal jammer.

In the general case, why would you want your data to be in other people's hands, so it can be analyzed and used against society (think price hiking algorithms determining what the "market will bear" for example)