A few years ago, while renovating a bathroom, we foolishly let ourselves be talked into installing a remote-controlled shower. Aesthetically, it was lovely; but the catch, as we soon discovered, was that every time the internet router crashed the shower stopped working. There was no manual override.

I remember after a few such incidents angrily phoning the plumber with my hair full of shampoo. Not long afterwards, the stupid internet shower was replaced by the regular kind. I remembered that shower while reading about the impact of yesterday’s Amazon Web Services outage.

AWS is not quite a monopolist in server space for networked services, but it’s a major backbone of that realm. The disruption, which lasted several hours, caused problems for massively popular websites including Duolingo, Roblox, and Snapchat, as well as ChatGPT, Grok, the ride-hailing app Lyft, and the streaming service Hulu. It also created trouble for purchasers of Eight Sleep’s Pod “sleep system”.

This internet-enabled mattress (yes, really) tracks heart rate, adjusts temperature and elevation, and will even play your choice of “white noise, nature sounds, or exclusive content from Andrew Huberman” while you enjoy “deep, uninterrupted sleep”. Except that, apparently, it only does this when AWS is working properly. The outage caused beds to freeze, overheat, and otherwise go haywire, forcing the company’s CEO, Matteo Franceschetti, to post an apology on X.

Will the AWS outage turn out to be a watershed moment for the so-called “Internet of Things”? Recent years have seen all kinds of unlikely machines made “smart”, which is to say internet-connected. As early as 2019, Wired was posting about a “smart fridge” that “smiles at you, plays music and shows you photos”. Other household goods which can now be connected to the internet include dishwashers, washing machines, kettles and toasters, plus of course heating systems and even light switches.

Perhaps we should interpret such devices as essentially gimmicks: inventors trying out an exciting new thing to see where it does or doesn’t work, a bit like the Fifties mania for experimental jelly recipes. Arguably, the “Internet of Things” that actually matters and will make a difference isn’t composed so much of white goods enabled by Wi-Fi, but instead autonomous delivery robots, attack drones, crewless freight ships and indeed the innumerable cameras and sensors that now track our movements across much of Britain.

Anxieties around these devices tend to focus on the potential for surveillance and unwanted impositions, whether remote deactivation of “smart” energy meters for Net Zero reasons, Ulez and facial recognition cameras in big cities, or a “smart fridge” update that now includes adverts you can’t switch off. But Eight Sleep’s out-of-control internet beds illustrate what is perhaps the real problem with such systems. Though a “smart” meter that can turn your electricity off remotely is indeed creepy, the difficulties with “smart” devices often arise less from excess cleverness than from the same issue as faced by my shower: all it takes is bad connectivity and your “smart” device is suddenly even dumber than if it had never been connected to Wi-Fi at all.

One Eight Sleep customer responded angrily to Franceschetti’s apology, saying that merely “outage-proofing” wasn’t enough and that the company should “make internet connectivity completely optional and stop requiring subscriptions […] people hate subscriptions, especially for a bed.” Which seems sensible to me, but invites the question: has this user considered buying, you know, a normal mattress? Most mattresses come with no internet connectivity or subscription payments, as standard, and can be relied on not to go haywire when Amazon Web Services encounters a database problem.

At the larger scale, the AWS outage suggests we should consider how far “smart” systems in fact allow everyday capacity to decay. From banking to newspapers and entertainment, so much of the world is now internet-enabled that, like my remote-controlled shower, there’s often no longer a manual option in the event of an outage. As the digital economy reels from events yesterday that briefly crippled major industries, all of us should be thinking about where to build in offline resilience. And also, perhaps, which aspects of life it’s smarter just to keep “dumb” — such as the mattress.

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Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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