posted in Technology

Pet owners say smart pet feeder outage led to furry ones going unfed

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).

arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/pet-owners-say-smart-pet-feeder-outage-led-to-furry-ones-going-unfed/

Replying to @⁨new_otters_raft@piefed.ca⁩

I have three of the feeders that were part of the outage. I echo the experiences reported, they stopped working correctly. I noticed they skipped a meal, so I unpaired them thinking it would fix it before I knew there was an outage. Then after unpairing two and being unable to re-pair, I looked up the status and saw the outage notice where they specifically advised against unpairing. So two feeders were out of commission, one still seemed to work on the programmed schedule. But that first skipped meal is a red flag for me.

For the comments asking why it needs WiFi: It doesn’t. When I turn off WiFi the feeders keep working on schedule. The WiFi is nice to have when I’m traveling to confirm they got fed, whether they’re low on food and I need to call someone to get more, stuff like that. Can also change the schedule remotely. It’s handy, but I chose these because they’re supposed to work even if WiFi and power go out.

This outage wasn’t just “it wouldn’t connect” but more like bad updates were pushed out, or maybe something went wrong with the timesync process? Whatever it was, I’m pretty miffed that the one advertised reason I bought these did not hold up. Doing something DIY for my next set would be cool, these comments are inspiring.

Edited ⁨⁨Aug⁩ ⁨17⁩, ⁨2026⁩, ⁨01:58⁩⁩en