I would have had no idea that anything had gone wrong had I not read about it in the news, but this week’s big Amazon Web Services outage most definitely affected a whole lot of others. This is, I’m sure we can all agree, very bad.
But there’s one aspect of it that has me personally feeling downright gleeful.
Among those impacted were the dinguses who bought those stupid smart beds I wrote about in June.
On Monday, users of Eight Sleep’s “Pod” mattress toppers – a near $2,000, three-layer mattress, that according to the company can be customized to “achieve the perfect mix of temperature control and comfort”- took to X and Reddit to voice their frustrations.
“I need to change the alarm in the morning, but the app won’t open. Tried restarting and even tried logging in on iPad, and won’t log in,” a Reddit User shared. “I feel like I’m held hostage to their app not working. I have no way to change the alarm now. Wtf?”
Another Sleep Eight user shared that their “girlfriend’s side of the bed set itself to 110 f and won’t turn down. Nightmare.”
CEO of Eight Sleep Matteo Franceschetti acknowledged the frustrations in an X post Monday evening.
“That is not the experience we want to provide, and I want to apologize for it.”
And then the company announced this, which is truly the mark of a detail oriented organization that unquestionably has every last bit of its shit together.
Franceschetti followed the apology with a promise to restore “all the features as AWS comes back,” and a commitment to “outage-proofing your Pod experience,” a process he said Eight Sleep would be working “the whole night+24/7,” to build so that the problem is “fixed extremely quickly.”
The company’s co-founder Alexandra Zatarain told the The Verge that shipments of the new “outage mode” began on Tuesday, allowing “the app to communicate with Pod devices over Bluetooth when cloud infrastructure is unavailable.”
“During an outage, you’ll still be able to open the app, turn the Pod on/off, change temperature levels, and flatten the base,” Zatarain told The Verge.
I seriously cannot believe this, even though I simultaneously oh so totally can.
Nobody, from conceptualization to construction to marketing to consumer, ever bothered asking “hey, what happens if the internet goes down”?
Great work all around, everyone. You all deserve every bit of your shitty week.