Jess Weatherbed, writing at The Verge, on one absurd failure from this week’s Amazon cloud outage:

Some smart bed users were quite literally losing sleep over the massive AWS outage on Monday. Eight Sleep’s elevating, temperature-controlling mattress systems were temporarily knocked out of service by Amazon’s server issues, with users on Reddit and X reporting their smart beds were stuck at sweltering temperatures and uncomfortable incline positions.

Don’t connect your bed to the internet.

The company’s “Pod” mattress toppers — which start at $2,000 depending on the model and size, alongside a monthly Autopilot subscription (starting at $17) to use the features — rely on cloud connectivity. An active internet connection is required to control temperature and elevation settings via the Eight Sleep app, and it previously didn’t provide a way to adjust features offline.

Don’t buy “smart” beds that cost $2,000 and require a monthly subscription.

[CEO Matteo] Franceschetti said that all Eight Sleep devices are “currently working” again as of Tuesday, and said, “We will work the whole night+24/7 to build an outage mode so the problem will be fixed extremely quickly.”

Don’t buy beds that need an “outage mode.”

“During an outage, you’ll still be able to open the app, turn the Pod on/off, change temperature levels, and flatten the base,” [co-founder Alexandra] Zatarain said.

Putting aside the questionable need for such features, why wasn’t this bed designed to work offline from the start? It’s a bed.