Pet parents furious as smart feeders go offline – dogs and cats go hungry
Some owners say their feeding schedules failed when Petlibro’s servers went down.
Image by Petlibro
- Petlibro’s smart feeders went offline during a days-long disruption, with some owners reporting their pets missed scheduled meals.
- Petlibro says saved feeding schedules should work without internet, but some owners say their feeders failed anyway.
- The disruption raises questions about relying on cloud-connected devices for essential pet care, especially while owners are away.
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Pet parents are furious after a days-long outage knocked Petlibro automated pet feeders offline, with some owners reporting their dogs and cats missed scheduled meals and the company scrambled to restore service.
Petlibro on Wednesday said the outage – blamed on “connectivity issues” – had been resolved, but by Thursday night the company was still receiving multiple reports of smart feeders failing to reconnect.
The disruption started early Tuesday morning at about 5:00 a.m. PT, according to a series of updates posted on social media and then on a Petlibro staus page created to keep customers informed.
Concerned pet parents reported being unable to remotely access or control the feeders using the the devices' companion app.
“We apologize for the ongoing connectivity issues with the Petlibro app,” the comapny told customers.
“We know this is stressful and we do not take this issue lightly. Our team continues to work as quickly as possible for a safe, sustainable solution to our connectivity issues.Petlibro said.
As fellow pet owners, we know how important the well-being of our pets is, and we apologize for any inconvenience the outage may have caused,”
Pets miss scheduled meals
Petlibro makes Wi-Fi-connected automatic feeders that allow pet owners to schedule meals and remotely monitor or control their devices through the company's mobile app, amomg other automated smart devices and cameras.
Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, the company said in June that its feeding technology is used across more than 1 million households.
Besides dispensing food, owners reported they couldn't remotely control feeders, check feeding records, or use the “Feed Now” option. Some notifications also weren't coming through to users' phones.
The caveat here is that Petlibro advertises that scheduled feedings should work without an internet connection, leaving users visibly upset.
Petlibro says the feeding schedule itself is saved locally on the feeder, meaning once the device is programmed to “feed Fluffy at 8 a.m.,” the feeder theoretically doesn't need to contact Petlibro's servers at 8 a.m. to dispense the food – it should release the food automatically at that time.
Several of the company’s own product pages promise that “scheduled meals continue even during network errors” and that “feeding schedules will continue to run automatically.”
Existing settings and schedules stored locally on your device will continue to operate as programmed. Stop lying to the customer. It’s not feeding."one user wrote online.
"Well, im glad this happened after I got back from my camping trip. But its quite annoying to have to physically get down to the feeders to manually press the buttons on the machine. Good luck to anyone who isnt currently home trying to frantically explain to someone else how to get these convoluted things to work," one user commented.
Another responded,"Well I can't manually feed them with the button because child lock is on, and that can only be disabled through the app."
Petlibro also warned customers that certain records created during the disruption may not be recoverable, including "some device operation history, feeding or litter box records, notifications, cloud-stored videos, and highlight videos."
Offline promises questioned
By Wednesday evening, Petlibro said app services had been fully restored and were operating normally after the two-day outage.
“We have successfully solved the issue that has caused app connectivity issues,” the company said.
Petlibro vowed to spend the following days "analyzing what happened to determine the cause and identify improvements."
But then in a troubleshooting update posted Thursday night, the company said it had received “multiple cases reporting devices not connecting to the internet after our recent app outage.”
The company advised affected customers to unplug their devices for one minute before reconnecting them and waiting three to five minutes.
Users whose devices still failed to connect were told to perform a factory reset and re-add the device through the Petlibro app.
Petlibro has not publicly identified the underlying cause of the outage.
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