AWS re:Invent Level 3 outage knocks out smart beds

An outage at Amazon Web Services not only disrupted apps and websites but invaded the bedroom. In fact, across several countries, connected smart beds mysteriously stopped being responsive to commands: As it got cold, they wouldn’t warm up; as sleepers lay there in an artificially induced swelter, sweating against their blankets. The outage laid bare a truth of modern home gadgetry: when the cloud goes dark, so does the stuff in your house.

How a cloud outage reached bedrooms around the world

Many top-tier smart beds (premium offerings, not to be confused with cheap ones that are merely connected) control temperature and motion through Wi‑Fi and a cloud backend. Controls — such as starting a cooling pump, changing a thermoelectric unit, or raising the base — are directed through an uplink to a remote service that also handles schedules, alarms, and sleep tracking. Even a single broken cloud or network link causes the control loop to break.

That architecture is popular because it allows for features like over‑the‑air updates, machine‑learning‑powered tuning, and cross‑device syncing. It’s also a concentration of risk. AWS commands roughly 31% of global cloud infrastructure spend, according to Synergy Research Group — in other words, a single provider underpins many consumer and enterprise services. When pieces of that infrastructure fall over, dependent devices can’t authenticate, load profiles, or perform actions, and many return to an idle state.

In more mundane surroundings, smart-bed systems transporting water through covers and blankets fell back to room temperature. Cool bedroom meant cold bed; warm room, overheating. Head lifts and bases that are used to help snoring, provide gentle elevation, or raise yourself slightly were also stuck in their prior positions — or deflated when the controls quit.

The smart bed brand hit hardest during the outage

One of the better-known temperature‑regulating bed systems comes from Eight Sleep’s Pod line, and it requires connectivity to the cloud to operate its primary features. The system consists of a water‑cooled cover and an optional blanket that attaches to a hub, and heats or cools each side of the bed, as well as custom accounts accessed via an app. The company also sells an adjustable base with vibration alarms and anti‑snore features. You can probably expect that a current setup will run you a couple of grand or even more once you tack on any accessories.

While the outage was underway, users said the temperature could not be controlled, alarms did not go off, and that trying to use the app resulted in a spinning wheel at login or errors.

Some reported beds that were suddenly “ice cold” in naturally cool rooms; others said their side of the bed warmed beyond a comfortable level and could never be dialed back. Some reports also mentioned high bases that would not decrease until service was restored.

Why temperature swings can wreck sleep quality

Thermoregulation is one of the bedrocks of sleep quality. The National Sleep Foundation suggests 60–67°F as the ideal bedroom temperature; it’s also believed that as we start to doze off, our internal row of dominoes usually includes a small uptick in core temperature. Smart beds aim to tune this curve gradually over time. That sort of control loss — to have cold lines of water running 55 degrees through a room you tried to cool, or a warm loop that stubbornly remains hot — precipitates micro‑awakenings, higher heart rate, and fragmented sleep structure.

For some residents, a temperature discrepancy of just 3–5°F is sufficient to attenuate sleep onset and early waking. That’s not counting missed alarms or snore‑abatement features that didn’t kick in.

What manufacturers say and the new smart bed Backup Mode

Eight Sleep did admit that the cloud was a big part of it and announced something called “Backup Mode,” which would save basic functionality if your Wi‑Fi or other cloud services go down. The company says the feature offers local control — like temperature changes and adjusting the base — when internet or cloud backend is unavailable thanks to Bluetooth. It’s being rolled out slowly, and features can vary based on whether the failure is in the home network or the remote service.

It is a meaningful step toward “graceful degradation,” the engineering principle that devices should continue to function in a limited but useful way amid power disruptions.

It also fits with direction from standards bodies such as NIST, which urge resilient, local‑first controls for connected devices that handle core functions.

The bigger IoT lesson from this disruptive outage

The outage highlighted a more general tension in smart‑home design: Many advanced features rely on cloud‑based processing, while basic functions need to remain operational without it. For products related to climate — thermostats, air purifiers, and temperature‑regulating beds — local control isn’t a nice‑to‑have; it’s table stakes in ensuring safety and reliability.

Single points of failure in consumer IoT are something industry analysts have long warned about. The solution is not to eschew the cloud that enables useful analytics, networking of devices, and updates, but to combine the two with strong offline modes, locally stored device schedules, and easy fallbacks like Bluetooth or direct physical controls.

What smart bed owners can do now to stay resilient

• Update the firmware and apps, if applicable, to enable any new offline or Bluetooth backup features.
• Pre-program conservative “last known” temperatures just before going to sleep so that if power fails, it doesn’t drop to something awful.
• Have a small uninterruptible power supply for your router and modem; the local Wi‑Fi you maintain can keep those Bluetooth bridges and some device functions working through brief outages.
• Keep analog backups — extra blankets or a fan — around to get you through those unforeseen stretches of dumb climate control.

The conclusion is straightforward: a cloud hiccup should not disrupt the course of a night’s sleep. The most recent outage made it quite evident just how easily it can. By having vendors also include offline controls and consumers thinking about fail‑safes around them, smart beds can deliver innovation while not making the thing that is so comfortable for someone into a single point of failure.