The major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage on Monday, October 20 not only caused chaos online, taking down several popular websites and internet connected apps, it also cause havoc in US bedrooms.
Owners of the $2,000 “Pod” sleep system from Eight Sleep, discovered during the outage that their smart beds would not work properly without an internet connection and would get stuck at high temperatures while putting them in odd sleeping positions (or non-sleeping positions) during the night, reports Dexerto.
The AWS outage began sometime around 3 a.m. Eastern Time, as AWS reported “increased error rates and latencies” in its US-EAST-1 region. By mid-morning, Downdetector had logged more than eight million reports of disruptions affecting apps, games, and banking platforms.
Unfortunately for Eight Sleep customers, the company’s products rely on constant connectivity with the cloud to control the temperature and to track biometric data. When AWS went offline, users were stuck with whatever setting that was last active. (The system uses an app to control its water-cooled coils.)
This caused some beds to overheat, while others stopped cooling altogether. Several users reported that their devices were completely unresponsive.
The AWS outage has impacted some of our users since last night, disrupting their sleep. That is not the experience we want to provide and I want to apologize for it.
We are taking two main actions:
1) We are restoring all the features as AWS comes back. All devices are currently…— Matteo Franceschetti (@m_franceschetti) October 20, 2025
We are rolling out a fix as we speak
— Matteo Franceschetti (@m_franceschetti) October 21, 2025
Tech enthusiast Alex Browne was duly frustrated, as his had Pod locked its temperature nine degrees above room temperature. “Backend outage means I’m sleeping in a sauna,” he wrote. “Eight Sleep confirmed there’s no offline mode yet, but they’re working on it.”
CEO Matteo Franceschetti said, “We will work the whole night+24/7 to build an outage mode so the problem will be fixed extremely quickly.”
AWS was able to restore normal operations by around 6 am ET, with most affected services coming back online soon after.
(Image Credit: Eight Sleep)
