Smart Beds Got Dumb: Internet Outage Left People Sleeping Like Pretzels

File this under “2025 problems”: The internet went down, and it broke people’s… beds? The increasingly connected world we all live in is getting weirder by the day.

Thanks to a major Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage this week, a bunch of tech-savvy households discovered that their “smart homes” don’t function so well without, you know, the internet. And the standout meltdown came from a company called Eight Sleep.

Smart beds are great… until they’re not

Eight Sleep makes high-end bed frames and mattress covers that do all sorts of fancy things like heating, cooling, and adjusting to different positions – you know, like a hospital bed, but luxury.

That is, until the cloud broke. Then each one became a $2,000 paperweight with a mattress on top.

People couldn’t make their bed flat

Because Eight Sleep’s beds rely entirely on cloud computing hosted by AWS, the outage left users completely stuck. If your bed was tilted upright for reading or Netflixing when the servers went kaput, that’s just how you were sleeping that night.

One user posted, “It would be great if my bed wasn’t stuck in an inclined position,” while someone else helpfully quipped, “It’s all fun and games until a hacker folds you into a taco.”

Mattresses also overheated

Some users also reported their mattresses overheating, since the smart temperature system went haywire during the blackout. One guy said his bed was stuck at 9 degrees above room temp and compared it to “sleeping in a sauna.”

Thankfully, the problems were only temporary

The beds eventually came back to life once Amazon sorted things out, and Eight Sleep scrambled to let customers know they were aware it was unacceptable. The company’s CEO promised an “offline mode” was in the works, so if there’s ever another outage (100% chance of that), your bed won’t trap you like it’s auditioning for Saw 12: Sleep Edition.

Or auditioning for a remake of 2013’s “Bad Grandpa”…