--- title: "Man Unable to Sleep When His AI-Controlled Mattress Suffers an Outage" description: "A San Francisco-based YouTuber had a sleepless night after his Eight Sleep cooling cover refused to behave, following an app outage." date: "2025-06-17" modified: "2025-06-17" authors: - name: "Victor Tangermann" job_title: "Senior Editor" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/victor" url: "https://futurism.com/man-sleep-ai-mattress-outage" categories: - "Artificial Intelligence" - "Health & Medicine" - "Sleep" tags: - "artificial intelligence" - "bed" - "mattresses" - "sleep" --- # Man Unable to Sleep When His AI-Controlled Mattress Suffers an Outage ![A San Francisco-based YouTuber had a sleepless night after his Eight Sleep cooling cover refused to behave, following an app outage.]() *\Image: Getty / Futurism\* YouTuber Theo "t3.gg" Browne had a bizarre — and hilariously 21st-century — reason for suffering through a sleepless night. "Woke up because my AI-controlled bed is too cold," the San Francisco-based content creator [wrote]() in a tweet that has since gone viral. Browne owns an intelligent mattress cooling system called Pod3, created by sleep tech company Eight Sleep. It boasts a host of sensors that track biometrics, including heart rate and sleep stages. An optional cooling cover cycles cooled or heated water through embedded coils, allowing sleepers to either raise or lower the temperature as needed. In short, it's an incredibly convoluted system, designed to reengineer something we've taken for granted for centuries. Unsurprisingly, things don't always go according to plan, especially given the level of technical complexity involved. "Went to adjust temperature and I can’t because the Eight Sleep app is currently broken," Browne wrote, [seething that the situation]() was "unacceptable." "Now I am stuck in a cold bed," he added. "This feels dystopian." It's an unexpected twist in a world increasingly dominated by algorithms. Tech companies have doubled down on stuffing AI features in all sorts of products, making them surprisingly difficult to avoid in day-to-day situations. To Eight Sleep, which has taken it upon itself to stuff beds with high-tech sensors, doubling down on AI just makes sense, even though humans have slept without it just fine since the dawn of time. "I do think in general, when we talk about mattresses and AI, the beauty of the mattress is that it's a huge surface that presents an opportunity to put in a lot of different sensors that can give the user a lot of interesting information about themselves," said Eight Sleep cofounder Alexandra Zatarain in a [statement]() last year. According to Zatarain, the goal is to "turn the mattress and the entire bed into a preventative health device," which can only be done "if we can use AI." While not everybody has [over $2,000]() to spend on a mattress, plus an "Autopilot" [software subscription of $25 a month](), plus almost $900 for the cooling cover itself, Browne's sleepless night highlights the seemingly unavoidable disadvantages of locking basic functionalities behind an app. Do we really need to whip out our smartphones to ensure that we don't freeze in bed? As such, it's easy to chortle at Browne's expensive and self-imposed discomfort. "Tech bros imagining a dystopia: what if the temperature settings on your climate-controlled bed were broken?" one amused X user [posited](). Browne [later confirmed]() with the company that "this was a backend outage." (*Futurism* has reached out to both Eight Sleep and Browne, but didn't immediately hear back.) "They also confirmed they are working on unblocking an offline mode, huge if true," he added. While many social media users had a field day with Browne's misbehaving mattress cover, others had some probing questions, imagining a dystopian future with paywalls blocking your bed's thermostat. "I wonder what happens to you when they go under as a business?" one user asked Browne. "You just sleep in a cold bed forever? This is \[software as a service\] gone entirely and obviously too far." "If that happens, I jailbreak my bed lol," Browne [answered](). We can't tell if he's being facetious or not. But considering the engineer's coding chops, we certainly wouldn't put it past him. Other users urged him to go low-tech to avoid any future headaches. "Get a f\*cking blanket," one X user [wrote](). **More on sleep and AI:** *[Large Numbers of People Report Horrific Nightmares About AI]()* ## Author I've been at Futurism since 2017, where my role has evolved to encompass design, writing, and increasingly editing. I've always been fascinated by space exploration and advanced transportation, which I've leaned into by interviewing luminaries in those fields while closely following the dimensions of policy and regulation that allow next-generation projects to succeed -- or, sometimes, to fail. I'm also keenly interested in the effects of generative AI on society, policies, and democratic institutions, as well as clean energy, physics and biology, and the vagaries of tech leadership. My work for Futurism has been cited by publications including Ars Technica, Gizmodo, PC Magazine, Jalopnik, Fox News, and the New York Post. I spent my childhood living in locations including Manila, the Philippines, and Geneva, Switzerland, attended McGill University, and now live in Toronto, Canada. Before Futurism I worked at AskMen and a small photography studio. In my free time, I'm an avid gardener, foodie, and craft beer lover, as well as a maker of artisanal hot pepper sauces. I have a magnificent dog named Freida. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()