Mastodawn

A funny case study of the 21st century “software engineering” at its best.

As result of #AWS failure, a number of commercial products stopped working that relied on AWS hosted services. Such as the Eight Sleep Pod beds.

Yes, physical beds for sleeping relied on AWS to work. And it was not some kind of extremely sophisticated “AI” processing, but simple schedule “make warmer”, “make colder”, “raise/lower” etc. All that was controlled through AWS.

When AWS stopped working users started complaining that their beds got stuck in weird positions and users were unable to control them. So yes, a bed say in Netherlands stopped working because it could not retrieve instructions from US server which were sent there by the person physically present on said bed.

And the bonus: each bed sent 20 GB of telemetry data to AWS each month.

Source: https://x.com/zimm3rmann/status/1980491408948572167 (on Twitter, sorry)

Michael Zimmermann (@zimm3rmann) on X

@m_franceschetti Is 16+gb/mo a normal amount of telemetry? Can you not do any local compute of “get hot” or “get cold” with a multi core processor and multiple gigabytes of memory? Can’t just repeat the previous nights settings? It’s bad enough that you slapped a $200/yr subscription on things,

X (formerly Twitter)

Impertinenzija Oct 21, 2025

@kravietz Here's their status website: https://status.8slp.net/
I'm still giggling.

Eight Sleep Status

Welcome to Eight Sleep's home for real-time and historical data on system performance.

kravietz 🦇Oct 21, 2025

@Impertinenzija

I can bet their lesson learned will be “it’s not who is morons, it’s everyone who uses AWS - so it’s fine”

Impertinenzija Oct 21, 2025

@kravietz Nothing else. ^^ Who needs Putin's trolls and drones? We're perfectly capable of jeopardizing our income, well-being and security ourselves by putting all our infrastructural eggs in one basket. XD

Anders Lagerfjärd Oct 21, 2025

@Impertinenzija @kravietz "We’re sorry for the inconvenience this has caused to your sleep."

Guarantee this is the first time I've seen that sentence in an outage status. Nearly spat my coffee. 😃

Impertinenzija Oct 21, 2025

@jalager @kravietz Yeah, it sounds like some awfully fucked up dystopian SF.

goedelchen Oct 21, 2025

@jalager @Impertinenzija @kravietz SaaS - Sleep as a service

Martin Seeger Oct 21, 2025

@kravietz We're in for a world full of hurt. And it will get a lot worse before it even stop getting worse.

And this before Al-Quaida and the Islamic State discover that datacenters hurt the US more than skyscrappers.

Rainer "friendica" Sokoll Oct 21, 2025

@masek @kravietz

Al-Quaida

Honestly, I've read AI-Quaida.

Martin Seeger Oct 21, 2025

Rainer "friendica" Sokoll Oct 21, 2025

❯ echo "Al Quaida\nAI Quaida"
Al Quaida
AI Quaida

Martin Seeger Oct 21, 2025

@rainer OK, da waren meine alten Augen nicht gut genug für 😄

goedelchen Oct 21, 2025

@rainer @masek AI Quaida - grossartig

Sarah W Oct 21, 2025

@kravietz
I couldn't sign up for an online doctor's appointment in France yesterday because of this.

Martin Seeger Oct 21, 2025

@Sarahw Next year, you won't be able to call an ambulance.

The Penguin of Evil Oct 21, 2025

@Sarahw @kravietz similar for some UK doctors. Which raises serious questions about where patient records might be living

Sarah W Oct 21, 2025

@etchedpixels @kravietz
It shows how reliant we are on a few companies without even realising it.

João Santos Oct 21, 2025

@kravietz your mistake is assuming their real commercial product is the bed and not the user data.

GrumpyDad 🇺🇦🇵🇸Oct 21, 2025

@kravietz Most things should never be network connected.
Or AI "enhanced"

Harald Oct 21, 2025

To cite myself:

The Future: premium devices will have the label "certified to work without Internet".

eruwero Oct 21, 2025

@kravietz I feel a bit guilty for laughing about this ridiculous bed thing. Unfortunately it's not a joke and some really dystopian surveillance bullshit but come on, who thinks they need crap like this?

Complexity of systems 🏳️‍⚧️Oct 21, 2025

@kravietz imagine a future where AWS goes down and stays down for days because the backup remote access solution that's supposed to be independent of their infrastructure and run by a third party turns out to rely indirectly on AWS and thay can't physically get into the data center because their access control system (Basically the "smart" locks on all of the doors) relies on AWS which is currently down

fmobus Oct 21, 2025

@addressforbots @kravietz kinda happened during one Facebook outage, their door locks / badging system was caught by the outage, and the team needed physical access to some equipment. Apparently the solution involved axes.

Jonathan Oct 21, 2025

... Also, it costs euther $17 or $25 a month.

But hey, bonus: you and your spouse can share the same membership.

(I also love how it says that if you use the bed warmer you can lower your heating by 5° and the savings there will cover the cost of running the bed. 🤣 I was waiting for them to say would more than offset the price of the subscription but nope😄)

Toni Aittoniemi Oct 21, 2025

@kravietz The incentive is to spy on everyone in a centralised fashion.

It happens because it’s legal, and gross mismanagement of sensitive private data isn’t punished to hell.

kravietz 🦇Oct 21, 2025

Yes, but in the first place it works because people continue to buy this crap.

CM Thiede Oct 21, 2025

@kravietz @gimulnautti a whole lotta "smart" people buying dumb crap. Or is it the other way around?

Perspective Oct 21, 2025

@kravietz and I thought it was bad 20 years ago when the internal controller for a piece of equipment required the OEM to come out with their laptop and DOS program to reset it before we could start it back up. 🤪

And no, they wouldn't sell us the program.

@kravietz what the fuck

DefiantSquirrel (he/him/his)Oct 21, 2025

@kravietz if a domestic appliance requires unfettered access to the Internet, it's not an appliance anymore. It's a surveillance device.

Thibaultmol 🌈Oct 21, 2025

@kravietz the same company that had ssh access to their beds and could do whatever the f*** they wanted on your network if they wanted to

filobus Oct 21, 2025

@kravietz buy their beds, you'll feel like sleeping on a cloud!
(Literally 🤭)

Nick Martin Oct 21, 2025

@kravietz Things like that are why I try to keep everything in my house as "dumb" as possible. The very idea of a smart house is just absurd

Jason Weill Oct 21, 2025

@kravietz That sounds like a lot. How much does Eight Sleep pay users for all this data?

Stephen Elliott~Buckley Oct 21, 2025

@kravietz boycotting #amazon and #ai also means cleansing #aws our of everything

#cdnpoli #canada #mexico #fascism #antifa #antifascist #elbowsup #bcpoli #vancouver #burnabybc #canlab #bcgreens #bcndp

Leeloo Oct 21, 2025

@kravietz
I hope the data protection authorities are taking notes. Every single one of these cases is a potential GDPR violation.

Beds, doctors appointments... All of them likely contain personal data.

Shafik Yaghmour Oct 21, 2025

this feels like the modern version of no one get fired for buying IBM.

Stuck Here Oct 21, 2025

Someone on Mastodon reported yesterday that their robotic vacuum had an existential crisis and made a horrid sound, grinding to and from the charging stand.

I can only imagine the internet connected refrigerators reporting the need for copious amounts of milk and butter during the outage.

Adrian W Oct 21, 2025

We’re not going to make it are we? The human race that is.

Bill Oct 21, 2025

The enshitification of everything

Elias Mårtenson Oct 21, 2025

@kravietz I have an automatic cat litter machine.

It works, kinda, without an Internet connection. In that it keeps cleaning, but configuration is not possible.

Well, unless you have an outage longer than a few days, that is. Then the little display will go all wonky and the buttons don't work anymore. Powering it on and off again will make it work for a few minutes, enough to force a clean if that's what you need.

I suspect a buffer is filled up internally and then it crashes. Because no one ever tested it without Internet connectivity for more than a few hours at most.

(the thing that went down was not my Internet connection, but the VPN to a different country that the VLAN the device is on was connected to, because I sure don't want it on my internal network)

I really, really hate the state of technology these days

eswillwalker Oct 21, 2025

@kravietz When we got a new heat pump for our house this year, we explicitly forbade the company from installing a thermostat that communicated via mobile phone. We do not want any “smart” appliances. We do not want to “rent” the car or appliance from the company that controls it. We want local control and local ownership.

Pēteris Krišjānis Oct 21, 2025

@kravietz top tier engineering

John Faithfull 🌍🇪🇺🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🧡✊🏻✊🏿Oct 21, 2025

Pacman Oct 21, 2025

@kravietz These telemetric beds measure the sexual activity of the user(s) with a device called an imaginophone which records sounds with a microphone and movements with a seismogram and uses AI to synthesise an imaginogram of what's going on "up there". For a fee the user(s) can have these deleted or archived in their Performance Profile (which will later be hacked and broadcast).

Asta [AMP]Oct 21, 2025

@[email protected] probably a good time to bring up the fact that Eight Sleep has awful security practices, tried to hop into bed with DOGE, and has bullshit manosphere wellness bro Andrew Huberman (who once stated he was as afraid of sunscreen as he was cancer) on their board:

https://trufflesecurity.com/blog/removing-jeff-bezos-from-my-bed

That 20 GB telemetry bundle is both A. not new, and B. probably not full of anything I'd personally want these types of people to know.

Removing Jeff Bezos From My Bed ◆ Truffle Security Co.

Eight Sleep smart bed found to contain an exposed AWS key and a likely backdoor that allowed engineers to remotely access users' beds

Keith Williams Oct 21, 2025

@kravietz As someone who's been using AWS since it was just SQS, S3, and EC2 it boggles my mind that anyone would own a home product that's dependent on the cloud to function and that any ethical person would design such a thing. Sure, use the cloud for enhancements and embellishments, but _never_ for core functionality.

F4GRX SÃ©bastien Oct 21, 2025

@kravietz KARMA thats all. fuck all these trash companies.

coldclimate Oct 21, 2025

@kravietz isn't that the same brand that people were ripping the smart brains out of and replacing with fish tank pumps? Telemetry data would be enough to make me do that

JonSaenzAgirre Oct 21, 2025

@kravietz the good part is the fridges showing commercials probably stopped working

Allan Chow Oct 21, 2025

@kravietz ok maybe my criticisms of plain text as a means of network communication across the internet being wasteful may be a bit much

Martin Gonzenbach Oct 21, 2025

@kravietz glad that my bed "works" off grid with zero bandwidth and CPU

SpaceLifeForm Oct 21, 2025

20GB per month to leak your sleep patterns seems like a waste of bandwidth.

#InternetOfShit

Richard W. Woodley ELBOWS UP 🇨🇦🌹🚴‍♂️📷 🗺️Oct 21, 2025

I thought Internet connected appliances were dumb, but furniture, really.

Next we'll be hearing people complaining because they cannot take a shit because the Internet is down.

KateT Oct 21, 2025

@kravietz And my husband thought I was nuts to suggest some folk might have been locked out of their fridges 😂

𝕾𝖎𝖗 𝕽𝖞𝖆𝖓 𝕿𝖍𝖔𝖒𝖆𝖘 Oct 22, 2025

@kravietz PSA self host your beds

Arniepix Oct 22, 2025

@kravietz
IOW, smart beds are stupid. ✅