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It feels like an impossible task these days to purchase a “dumb” appliance that doesn’t need a constant internet connection and a slew of over-the-air updates — not to mention a completely unnecessary infusion of “AI.”
And while most of the time the consequences of a broken update or server downtime are trivial, the stakes are considerably higher when it comes to feeding our pets.
As The Verge reports, cat owners were horrified when they realized that their expensive smart pet feeders from the company Petlibro started missing feeding schedules due to an outage that started on August 11.
“Feeder still offline, scheduled feedings do NOT work despite company claims,” one disgruntled Reddit user wrote in an August 12 post after Petlibro claimed that service had been “restored.”
It’s a particularly precarious issue for owners who aren’t home when the feeders dispense food — a core demographic for the tech.
“I am on vacation and cannot tell if my cats are being fed or not,” another user wrote. “One device will be online while the other is not and vice versa.”
In a statement to The Verge, Petlibro CEO York Wu argued that scheduled feedings “are programmed directly onto the device and should continue to run as scheduled without an internet command.”
However, he admitted that the company was “aware of reports from some customers whose devices did not behave as expected.”
In an August 15 update, Wu addressed the company’s disgruntled customers directly, arguing that Petlibro will “continue to hold ourselves to a high standard and are committed to learning from this situation.”
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