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.”
Wu said that the company was investigating “primary” and “secondary issues” that were caused by the outage” while promising to scale up its customer support team.
But users weren’t exactly impressed, accusing the company of trying to downplay the severity of the situation.
“Nothing about moving schedules offline and locally,” one Reddit user responded. “Just a bunch of PR speak.”
“No where have I seen Petlibro state that this incident was unacceptable to pet owners,” another wrote. “Just an inconvenience. They are really understating the severity of the trouble they caused to their users.”
The incident certainly highlights the many pain points of forcing internet connection-dependent services on consumers often against their will. It’s a frustrating aspect of living in a society where even ovens and washing machines apparently need to be Wi-Fi connected for some reason.
“So frustrating, I could’ve been away for the day and my cat wouldn’t have any food because of this,” one disgruntled cat owner wrote. “Now I need to put up a camera or something to make sure this doesn’t happen again. They won’t even send us an email telling us about the outage, I have to come to Reddit every time.”
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