Some users of the smart-bed system Eight Sleep, who sleep atop a snug, temperature-regulating mattress cover in search of “zero-gravity rest,” were rousted from their slumber earlier this week for a surprising reason.
Eight Sleep’s collections of smart products, which the company calls “Pods,” and include those “intelligent” mattress covers, were affected by an outage involving the cloud-storage provider Amazon Web Services, which sent large sectors of the internet into disarray on Monday.
The outage, which lasted more than two hours, took down websites for banks, gaming sites and entertainment services, as well as the messaging service WhatsApp. But it also affected people trying to get some shut-eye.
(First, to answer a question readers might have: Yes, there are smart mattress covers, just as there are smart watches, smart door locks and smart refrigerators.)
Isaiah Granet, 25, woke up at 1 a.m. drenched in sweat, thinking he was lying on his laptop. When he tried to adjust the temperature, he found that he couldn’t access the product’s app.
“It’s not loading because of A.W.S., which means I have no way to access my bed,” he remembered thinking. He ended up sleeping on the heated mattress all night.
Mr. Granet, a founder of a start-up called Bland AI, received his Pod as a gift two weeks ago. Until the outage, Granet said, the cover allowed him to get “phenomenal sleep.”
Matteo Franceschetti, the company’s chief executive and one of its founders, said in a statement and on social media that the outage had affected some users and that the company was working on fixes.
“That is not the experience we want to provide and I want to apologize for it,” Mr. Franceschetti, said on X on Monday.
Eight Sleep, which is based in New York, introduced the Pod in 2019, at a time of rising interest in using technology to track sleep patterns, contributing to the popularity of wearable devices like Fitbits and Apple Watches. (One reason sleep experts say people have difficulty sleeping is because of how much we are looking at screens.)
The system includes covers — with multiple models costing thousands of dollars each — and it relies on cloud computing to control the bed’s temperature and track sleep patterns.
In addition to the cost of the mattress cover, there is a monthly subscription, which can include features like automatic temperature adjustments, vibration and thermal alarms, and snoring detection or mitigation, according to the Eight Sleep website. A customer can add a $999 pillow cover, which the company says “slips onto any pillow, turning it cool all night.”
But the company became the object of social media derision after Monday’s outage. Mr. Granet and others did not realize that their beds had to connect to a cloud computing service to work properly.
For Jason Jin, a founder of Zest Labs, a New York City-based start-up aimed at improving sleep patterns, the mattress became too cold. Mr. Jin, 27, a Pod customer for two years, didn’t realize what had happened because he follows a strict no-screens policy overnight to help with his sleep. He put on a sweater.
“I still plan to continue to use it,” he said. “The main friction point is, really, the mattress should work even without Wi-Fi.”
Even though the cloud-computing outage had ended, the company said it was still working on preventing future disruptions for its customers.
Two days after the outage, Mr. Franceschetti posted that Eight Sleep was rolling out “Backup Mode,” which he said would allow the app to communicate with the smart cover directly over a Bluetooth connection, should the cloud or wireless internet be unavailable.
Armin Ronacher, a 36-year-old tech entrepreneur in Vienna, noticed that his bed was stuck in a heated position, but he avoided night sweats because the outage happened during his waking hours in Austria.
“I don’t think it is a particularly big story beyond: ‘Why the hell does a tech company over-engineer the product so much? And why do they even have a subscription for a mattress to begin with?” Mr. Ronacher said.
To Rohan Nagabhirava, who started using Eight Sleep products eight years ago, the outage was a rather amusing blip.
Mr. Nagabhirava, a 21-year-old graduate student of artificial intelligence and engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, slept through the night of the outage and woke up to realize that two hours of tracking data had been lost.
“I just really care about my sleep quality,” Mr. Nagabhirava said. “I’m already pressed for time doing so many things. Just one thing I really like to optimize is my health, and I think getting as much quality sleep as possible is worth it.”
Sopan Deb is a Times reporter covering breaking news and culture.
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