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316

Pet owners say smart pet feeder outage led to furry ones going unfed (arstechnica.com)

submitted 3 days 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 3 days ago (2 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 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days 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 3 days ago

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

[–] Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I kind of think that someone who relies on this 100% of the time maybe shouldn't have a pet. Pets need company and affection. I mean, I'd love to get a dog again but now I'm just working too much and it wouldn't be fair.

[–] LastYearsIrritant@sopuli.xyz 4 points 3 days ago

It could be that their work schedule makes it so they're not home for meal times, but are home for other times

It could be that people happened to be traveling for this and most cats are fine with an occasional day or two home alone.

It could be that some of them are really bad with daily scheduled tasks and need something to help take that load off.

Maybe consider not being super judgemental about how people manage their pets, there's perfectly reasonable reasons why people might want, or even need, an auto feeder.

[–] ComradePenguin@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 days ago

I use it to make sure that our pets don't go hungry for long. So that they don't eat everything and then have to wait for 6 or 12 hours until the next feeding. So I just feed them every two hours automatically.