this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2026
316 points (98.8% liked)

Technology

87400 readers
4089 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
L3s@lemmy.world
enu@lemmy.world
technopagan@lemmy.world
L4s@lemmy.world
L3s@hackingne.ws
316
Pet owners say smart pet feeder outage led to furry ones going unfed (arstechnica.com)
submitted 6 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).

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Taleya@aussie.zone 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Its cheaper.

They can design the device to be standalone, with increased hardware costs...or farm that processing to their servers, with the bonus of also giving them the ability to kill it on command so you just have to buy a new one and having lots of metric data to sell

[–] xthexder@l.sw0.com 4 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

I guarantee you the microcontroller that handles the wifi is 10x more powerful than what would be required to just run an offline schedule. ~~There's no processing involved... It's not like this is using a camera + AI to see if your cat is too fat.~~

Edit: I just looked up this model and its actual features... it's not that far off, since it seems to run image recognition to tell when the cat is eating. If they're streaming video back to the cloud for processing, that sounds even worse than what I was expecting. It would be entirely possible to run a small image recognition model locally in a product like this.

There are much simpler solutions like the ones that detect a chip in the pets collar (or the embedded id chip most pets have)