Eight Sleep Ships Backup Mode After AWS Outage

A widespread AWS outage on October 20 disrupted thousands of services and left some owners of Eight Sleep’s cloud‑dependent Pod mattress covers unable to control temperature or elevation. Users reported beds stuck at extreme settings—some sides reportedly reached about 110°F—while others were trapped in elevated positions or emitting alarms and some physical buttons were reportedly nonfunctional. The problems were tied to Eight Sleep’s reliance on cloud services and its Autopilot/subscription model, which previously required online connectivity even for core controls. CEO Matteo Franceschetti apologized, said the company restored service as AWS recovered, and committed to outage‑proofing the Pods; Eight Sleep has begun shipping an Outage/Backup Mode that lets the app connect directly to Pods over Bluetooth for local control. The incident reignited criticism of smart‑home devices that depend on remote servers and prompted renewed calls for built‑in offline controls.