🌩️ The night AWS went down (and Eight Sleep owners woke up sweating)

On October 19–20, a massive AWS outage took down over 1,000 apps and websites, including Eight Sleep. The ripple effects are a story for the internet history books.

On October 19–20, a massive Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage took down over 1,000 apps and websites, including Snapchat, Netflix, Reddit, Lyft, Venmo, WhatsApp, Disney+, and countless others.

(Even this newsletter was impacted: our email wasn’t sent out until 2:38 PM, when we usually publish around 8-9 AM on Monday’s!)

But here’s the twist:

Even as AWS servers crashed, Amazon’s stock rose.

• Friday, Oct 17 2025 close: $213.04

• Monday, Oct 20 2025 close: $216.48 📈 (+1.6%)

No one lost trust in AWS from this incident. If anything, everyone was reminded how indispensable AWS really is.

When 30% of the internet runs on AWS infrastructure, an outage can actually be the perfect reminder to the market of AWS’ market dominance.

Source: Statista

And this isn’t the first time this has happened: a major AWS outage in December 2021 led Amazon shares to close +3%.

Market dominance has a funny way of creating more trust for the AWS brand.

😴 Eight Sleep owners woke up sweating

Among the affected companies was Eight Sleep, the startup that sells “smart” mattresses and toppers to optimize your sleep with real-time temperature and tilt adjustments.

When AWS went down, so did Eight Sleep’s servers, and suddenly, people woke up in the middle of the night in beds that were too hot or stuck at odd angles.

Welcome to 2025: the era where you pay a monthly subscription to sleep better… and end up being woken up by a cloud outage.

To his credit, Eight Sleep’s CEO Matteo Franceschetti responded the same day.

He announced that the team would work day and night to build an outage mode that keeps beds functional even when AWS goes down.

And wow, did his team deliver. By Wednesday, less than 48 hours from the time he originally tweeted about an outage mode, the Eight Sleep engineering team had shipped Backup Mode.

Customers even suggested extending Backup Mode to Wi-Fi outages, and Eight Sleep actually incorporated this feedback in their Phase 2 update.

Eight Sleep nearly lost customer trust on October 20th, but they won it back by communicating fast and shipping faster.

⏰ A Wake-Up Call for Builders

Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch was among those jolted awake by his Eight Sleep bed during the outage.

His reaction?

“The silver lining: this is as good of a chaos-engineering exercise as it gets.”

Vercel’s systems were resilient but faced some degradation as a result of the outage.

Instead of frustration, Guillermo treated it as a live-fire drill and an opportunity to harden the product.

That’s the builder mindset in action.

Outages are inevitable, but they present a rare opportunity to test & improve your systems.

💡 Takeaways for Product Builders

• Outages will happen. Learn from them, run post-mortems, and use them to build stronger products. Eight Sleep’s Backup Mode is a perfect example: a feature born from chaos.

• Communicate early, fix fast. The best teams earn trust by how they respond, not how they prevent every issue.

Every technical crisis is an invitation to optimize your product for resilience.

And as AWS and Eight Sleep proved this week, sometimes, even when things break, trust goes up.

Side bar: the Eight Sleep incident is exactly why I wrote “Not Everything Needs to be SaaS”. Down with subscriptions!