Owners of Eight Sleep smart beds woke up in a sweat Monday night, and not because they were having bad dreams.
Instead, they were literally sweating as their malfunctioning beds—which had been knocked offline due to Monday’s massive Amazon cloud outage—began overheating and got stuck upright, or in other ungainly positions.
It was an embarrassing situation, no question—a bed got knocked offline?—and it led to a hoard of angry Eight Sleep users, an apology from the company’s CEO, and a slew of bad headlines.
The Eight Sleep snafu served as yet another example of smart technology that suddenly turns dumb once there’s an internet or server outage. Indeed, a “dumb” bed with heating and position controls that actually work was briefly smarter than Eight Sleep’s $2600-and-up smart “pods,” which completely froze up during the global AWS crash.
But then something interesting happened. Eight Sleep acted, and it acted fast.
Within two days of the AWS outage, Eight Sleep delivered what its CEO promised Monday: an offline “Backup Mode” that allows the Eight Sleep app to connect locally to the company’s smart beds via Bluetooth during a Wi-Fi or internet outage.
Backup Mode offers only limited functionality compared to the cloud-enabled Eight Hours experience—no sleep schedules, for example, nor will the bed’s temperature be automatically regulated.
But at least you’ll be able to manually adjust the temperature and bed position, as well as turn the beds on and off. (Eight Sleep owners had to unplug their overheating beds during the Amazon cloud downtime.)
Eight Sleep’s Backup Mode certainly isn’t perfect—and, arguably, should have shipped a long time ago. Still, it’s here now, and hats off to the company for getting its fix out so quickly.
Eight Sleep’s fast reaction to a critical dependency on the cloud is, sadly, more than the exception than the rule when it comes to the smart home market.
Take Amazon’s Ring and Blink cameras, which went down for the count during the AWS outage. Yes, the Ring Alarm Pro home security system and some Blink Sync Modules (specifically, the Sync Module 2 and Sync Module XR) both offer local storage of video recordings, but the cameras themselves were unreachable during the Amazon cloud blackout. And yes, Ring and Blink cameras are back online again, but only until the next big cloud outage comes around.
Then there’s Sengled and its Wi-Fi bulbs, which were useless for weeks following a series of Sengled server outages. The good news is that Sengled appears to be sputtering back to life, but likely too late for exasperated customers who went ahead and switched to another ecosystem. (Sengled’s Matter and Zigbee bulbs, which can be controlled with local smart hubs, were notably immune to the company’s server woes.)
Another example: Tablo and its over-the-air DVRs, which suffered a pair of outages back in August that left their owners unable to view their recordings or watch live TV. To its credit, Tablo manufacturer Nuvyyo did finally release an offline mode for fourth-generation Tablo DVRs, but it was a fix that long-suffering Tablo owners had been waiting years for.
The great AWS outage of 2025 should serve as a wakeup call for smart home makers who sell products dependent on the cloud—because cloud outages happen, sooner or later, rendering their smart devices stupid in the blink of an eye. At least some smart product manufacturers are doing something about it.
