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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[–] ComradePenguin@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 week ago (5 children)

My pets got fed through the entire outage. I did not care to get a 100% reliable solution, as it is just a convenience for us. Not something we rely on. Actually relying on 100% on this is a bad idea.

At this point the most annoying part for me has been the wild amount of emails and info about this outage.

[–] douglasg14b@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

It seems very reasonable for owners of this device to expect something as simple as a schedule to work without having to phone home first.

As a software engineer, blows my mind how teams build shit like this

[–] ComradePenguin@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago

It does work for me at least. So our schedule is stored locally, it seems.

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