A funny case study of the 21st “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)
