68
AWS crash causes $2,000 Smart Beds to overheat and get stuck upright
(www.dexerto.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2025
68 points (97.2% liked)
Technology
40086 readers
74 users here now
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.
Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
It's kind of amazing to think about how none of these products are designed to have a fallback functionality during an outage.
Iirc Amazon has a special tooling for creating iot devices. It's supposed to make creating the communication easier so you don't have a bunch badly implemented communication systems. Ofc it uses Amazon's cloud.
I would not be surprised if they all failed this way due to using the tool. As in the Dev's code might not even get to know there was an outage, and the tool just keeps telling it the last state it got.
Yeah, it's almost certain everybody would just end up using the same library.
It’s gotta be more than just an outage that did this. Like seriously, your internet goes out and your bed breaks? Why didn’t we hear anything about this before? Certainly these people have had home internet go out?!
I’m just imagining it’s a bug of sorts where the bed can access some things but not some other resource specifically not needs so it got caught in an unexpected condition.
npr did a short segment a few years ago of people with smart homes that had problems like this, water stopped running; lights wouldn't turn on; people forgot passwords to security systems and entry ways.
some things shouldn't be connected like this.
It could be that it did happen before, but it was just individual cases and if the outage wasn't long then probably wasn't noteworthy. This time it was a whole bunch of people affected all at once for a prolonged period. And you're likely right that there's probably a series of states the device can be in, and it does calls to AWS as it moves through them, so probably got stuck at a particular stage and couldn't move forward cause it couldn't talk to the mothership.