Pretty sure the recent incident of Amazon Web Services’ “US-EAST-1” data center region were known by many as of now, where it made half the world halt for hours (Is this CrowdStrike no.2). As websites scrambled to bring themselves back up during the downtime, the DNS error has affected one smart bed brand called Eight Sleep, and its subscription-based services.
Known for offering various “smart features”, apparently the temperature control function and tilt-angle of its bed products are all “online only”, and with AWS being dead during the midnight hours for some folks, reports and statements shared that they were being “spooked” at 2 AM by an 80°F warmth, while others are saying the beds are stuck upright in an extremely frustrated tone.
Of course, CEO of Eight Sleep, Matteo Franceschetti apologized on X, stating that it’s “not the experience we want to provide,” while assuring that the company is working on “outage-proofing” its systems to prevent similar issues in the future. He said this update should be completed by the end of the day.
He later confirmed that all customer issues were resolved by 10 p.m. ET on October 20 and that the company is developing a new failsafe to prevent service lockouts during future outages.
Eight Sleep’s lineup includes the Pod 4 mattress cover (US$2,649), the Pod 5 Core (US$3,049) with dual-zone cooling and heating plus sleep tracking, and the premium Pod 5 Ultra (US$5,049) with advanced comfort and anti-snoring design. Props to the brand on quickly committing to adding offline options for users to control their products after realizing going fully online is just a time bomb waiting for the right time to go off.
Source: PCMag
