this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2026
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316
Pet owners say smart pet feeder outage led to furry ones going unfed (arstechnica.com)
submitted 1 week ago by new_otters_raft@piefed.ca to c/technology@lemmy.world
124 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

This feels like bad design

Smart pet-feeder company Petlibro suffered an outage on Tuesday, giving users a harsh reminder of the risks of relying on smart devices.

Petlibro makes pet feeders that connect to Wi-Fi and, for setup with Petlibro’s mobile companion app, Bluetooth. Users can set the feeders to automatically dispense food at scheduled times, which is handy for pet care when the owner is out of the home.

In a statement to The Verge, Petlibro CEO York Wu said this week’s outage was “related to how the Petlibro app communicates with devices through its online servers.”

Some user reports have also conflicted with Petlibro’s claims about offline functionality. As The Verge pointed out, various users online claimed that during the outage, their devices did not perform any scheduled feedings, performed some feedings but not others, or performed feedings late (examples here, here, here, here, and here).

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[–] shortwavesurfer@lemmy.zip 77 points 1 week ago (16 children)

And this is why you use local only devices fools.

Get yourself a Zigbee Pet Feeder and pair it with Home Assistant and you're good to go.

[–] NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 35 points 1 week ago (7 children)

Why in fuck would a device that activates a motor once or twice a day on a schedule need any kind of network connectivity? This is an ultra-dumb programmatic function, it shouldn't need any more compute power than an alarm clock. Why would you hook it up to a smart home anything?

It should be exactly this complicated:

Anything beyond that is like killing a housefly with a bazooka.

[–] Septimaeus@infosec.pub 9 points 1 week ago

Totally agree (keep it simple) and I use a simple timer failsafe on mine, but just pointing out:

Minimum interval of that plug will fill the bowl jam the motor. Gears will strip without intervention.

Nbd tho, you can wire up a secondary timer relay circuit for portion control. Just keep the wires tidy, and raised if there’s a water bowl nearby.

And probably don’t want 220 anywhere near the feeding area so use a 5v wall wart or whatever.

Eh, might also want to consider a battery backup option in case power goes out while you’re on a work trip.

Just make sure to keep both interfaces accessible for later manual adjustments. Can take a while to dial it in, you know, based on current activity levels, which can change seasonally. Also be ready to fuck with it pretty much any time you switch their feed.

Etc etc

I kid — I’m sure you get why nerdy control freaks wire these things up to HA and whatever

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