On Monday morning, the Internet once again demonstrated that the cloud is not a mystical force but someone else’s computer, and that someone else occasionally has a bad day. A DNS failure at an Amazon Web Services data center in Virginia triggered widespread disruptions. Services slowed, crashed, or vanished. Even seemingly unrelated devices stopped working.
Among the less expected victims were the so-called “smart” mattresses of the New York company Eight Sleep. The firm’s flagship product, the Pod, promises the future of sleep, with self-regulating temperature, automatic posture adjustment, and AI-driven comfort. Prices start at around 2,849 euros, plus a monthly subscription of at least 17 euros for the “Autopilot” feature that decides whether you are too warm, too cold, or just paying too much.
When AWS went down, the mattresses followed.
Customers who had tilted their beds for reading found themselves locked upright, unable to lie down until the cloud recovered. Those who relied on cooling spent the night sweating, while others discovered that the heating remained stubbornly stuck on “volcano.” Social media did not disappoint, documenting both the humor and the horror of being outsmarted by one’s own bed.
The company’s CEO apologized and promised an “offline mode,” which might ironically become the smartest feature the product ever had.
While the Internet laughed, some of us nodded.
At our NeuralWeave AI, we have built an entirely different philosophy. NeuralWeave is an AI image indexer and visual search engine created for professionals who value privacy, performance, and control. It runs entirely on premise, with no cloud, no tracking, and no security nightmares. Zero API exposure, local only architecture, no external calls, no vendor lock in, and complete control over your data.
We learned long ago that the biggest problems in cloud systems rarely come from technical failure but from human neglect. The person who ordered the subscription leaves the company, the credit card on file expires, the reminder email bounces, and suddenly entire systems go dark. It is a familiar story. One such incident once ground a newspaper to a full stop because the billing contact had retired, taking the corporate card and the password with him. Everything was immediately cut off, including production.
That is exactly why our NeuralWeave AI is both open source and on premise. You can run it anywhere, keep it forever, and never depend on a cloud contract or a forgotten renewal. If your Internet connection fails, NeuralWeave keeps working. If your finance department forgets a credit card, NeuralWeave does not care. If someone unplugs the world’s biggest data center, your search engine will still deliver results.
Because true intelligence does not live in the cloud. It lives where your data does.