Eight Sleep's smart beds malfunctioned during an AWS outage on October 20, causing beds to overheat, get stuck in inclined positions, and become unresponsive due to lack of offline functionality.
On October 20, a major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage in the US-EAST-1 region beginning around 3 AM ET caused widespread disruptions to Eight Sleep's smart bed systems. Eight Sleep's 'Pod' mattress covers, which cost $2,600 and up, rely on cloud connectivity to control temperature through water-cooled coils and track biometric data. When AWS went down, users lost access to the app that manages their beds, leaving them stuck with whatever setting was last active. Some beds overheated to temperatures 9 degrees above room temperature, others stopped cooling altogether, and several became stuck in inclined positions. Users reported being unable to control their beds through either the app or physical side buttons. The outage affected millions of users across various platforms, with Downdetector logging over eight million reports of disruptions. AWS restored normal operations by around 6 AM ET. Eight Sleep CEO Matteo Franceschetti apologized for the incident and promised to work '24/7' to build an 'outage mode.' The company subsequently released an 'Outage Access' feature allowing the app to communicate directly with beds when cloud infrastructure is unavailable.
Domain classification, causal taxonomy, severity scores, and national security assessments were LLM-classified and may contain errors.
AI systems that fail to perform reliably or effectively under varying conditions, exposing them to errors and failures that can have significant consequences, especially in critical applications or areas that require moral reasoning.
AI system
Due to a decision or action made by an AI system
Unintentional
Due to an unexpected outcome from pursuing a goal
Post-deployment
Occurring after the AI model has been trained and deployed