AWS outage turned smart homes into dumb boxes – and sysadmins into therapists

When Amazon's cloud face-planted on Monday, it didn't just take down some of the world's most popular apps – it took down dignity, comfort, and the occasional cat toilet.

The AWS outage saw a long list of services go dark, from Snapchat to Signal, but the real victims were the gadgets that revealed how ludicrously cloud-dependent our creature comforts have become.

One of the standout casualties was EightSleep, the so-called smart mattress that learns your body, adjusts its temperature, tracks your sleep phases, and streams that data back to the cloud for a cool $200 a month.

"My bed is stuck in Relax mode and won't change," moaned one user, while another admitted they were "sweating through my sheets because the app's dead."

Another exasperated sleeper noted that EightSleep pumps out 16 GB of data a month – an impressive haul to generate while unconscious.

Meanwhile, the ...