Farce comes to the Internet. All right, farce comes to the Internet again. With the failure of AWS this week, many, many services were interrupted, including my Spanish learning app. It was annoying but, after all, you can always practice Spanish or do your banking, or whatever a little bit later.
But one group of users is especially aggrieved. It turns out that some people actually have their mattress connected to the Internet. What could go wrong? Apparently, a bunch of people found out with the AWS outage. So called “smart mattresses” monitor your sleep patterns and can adjust the mattress temperature on the fly.
Imagine the consternation from the purchasers of these $2000 mattresses when their sleeping temperature is disrupted. How can one possibly get a decent night’s sleep if the mattress isn’t adjusting the temperature according to our sleep patterns? Of course, the vast majority of the world knows the answer to that question and deals with it every night. They raise or lower the covers, put a leg outside the blankets, or do any of a number of things to adjust their sleep temperature.
Of course, all of this is in good fun. I doubt even the people—or at least most of them—who own these smart mattresses are taking this very seriously but it does make a point: we are—more and more—relying on a stable Internet connection for many aspects of our lives but that connection is extremely fragile. A large part of the problem is that a huge number of these services depend on Amazon, Google, or Microsoft to provide those services. That’s a lot of eggs in every few baskets.