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 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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[–] douglasg14b@lemmy.world 21 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

Ah yes, the classic "the stupid consumers are stupid" argument.

This was sold as being an offline-capable device. It even has battery slots for power outages.

Perhaps instead of shitting on people for buying something they thought would be nice and work well, we shit on the company that can't even give a pet feeder an on-device offline schedule after selling people on a device that's supposed to work offline and even during power outages.

And figure out how we can hack it and enable folks to control the hardware they own, because they weren't stupid for buying a pet feeder. The company that runs it just does so in a moronic way.

(I don't own one of these, but I have considered it a few times, and this just pisses me off)

[–] AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 9 points 3 days ago

So is it poor design or cases where users didn't put batteries in?

[–] Itdidnttrickledown@lemmy.world -1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Any cloud connected device that stops functioning when there is a outage is stupid. Its stupid to buy one.

[–] luciferofastora@feddit.org 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

What about a device that can function offline?

[–] Itdidnttrickledown@lemmy.world 0 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Yes. That is what I'm saying.

[–] luciferofastora@feddit.org 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

But that's what they bought. That's what was advertised and sold to them.

It was just false advertising.

[–] Itdidnttrickledown@lemmy.world 0 points 3 days ago

I've bought two cloud connected devices that promised manual control. Only one did. It was the first thing I did was verify it was true by never using the cloud part of it.