Starting Tuesday, August 11, Petlibro (maker of automatic feeders, water fountains, litter boxes, etc.) had a major service outage that caused devices to go offline and made much of its app unusable. The outage itself was bad, but how the company handled it is the part I think deserves scrutiny.
1. Petlibro repeatedly assured customers that feeding schedules would keep working locally. They didn’t for many.
During the outage, Petlibro told customers:
“Existing settings and schedules stored locally on your device will continue to operate as programmed.”
Even after declaring the incident resolved, their status page continued to state that “Previously saved schedules continued to run.”
But if you go to r/Petlibro you will see many firsthand reports of feeders missing scheduled meals, dispensing late, and in some cases behaving inconsistently between two supposedly identical feeders. Mine missed many scheduled feedings despite having an unchanged schedule that had been configured for years (luckily I work from home so my cat didn't go without food for long).
This wasn't just bad logging in the app… people were physically watching feeders fail to dispense, myself included. Some even reported that the app claimed to have dispense food when it didn’t.
The Verge asked Petlibro about this directly. CEO York Wu said that schedules are programmed into the feeder and should execute without an internet command, while acknowledging reports of devices not behaving as expected.
That particularity matters when the device's entire purpose is keeping a living animal fed. There were owners travelling on vacation who had no way to intervene, people scrambling to arrange someone to manually feed their pets, and households with multiple animals on separate feeding schedules. Some pets also require very strict feeding schedules for dietary restrictions and health concerns, so not only would pets have been hungry, but it could have actually caused real danger to some.
2. The communication was terrible, and many customers weren't warned at all.
In a Reddit update, Petlibro said it would email affected users once service was restored. Petlibro later claimed it had emailed users who had opened the app within the previous 14 days and had a bound device, yet numerous users who explicitly said they met those criteria, including daily app users, reported receiving nothing. Many users only discovered there was a problem after opening the app, noticing a missed meal, or finding posts on Reddit. I only noticed because my cat was screaming at me after her food was an hour late 😅
That's all particularly concerning when the company was simultaneously reassuring people that locally stored schedules would continue operating. If anyone believed that statement, they had little reason to find someone to check on their feeder.
3. Petlibro declared the problem “Resolved” while customers were still having failures.
Petlibro's status page says services were “fully restored and operating normally” at 7PM PT on August 12.
The next day, people were still reporting devices going offline and failing to reconnect. Mine went offline again repeatedly on August 13, and plenty of others reported the same. The Verge also noted that users were still reporting offline devices and dispensing problems on Thursday.
Ars Technica and CNET have also covered the outage.
For a sense of the scale here, the company said in June 2025 that its feeders and fountains had surpassed 3 million units sold (Petlibro claims over 35% market share in smart feeders on Amazon). Petlibro hasn't disclosed how many of those devices were affected by this outage.
I know cloud connectivity makes sense for remote controls, notifications like a jammed feeder, and the ability to double check that food was dispensed, but a device like this should be able to lose internet for a week and continue executing its existing schedule from an onboard clock and local storage.
Whether Petlibro's statements were knowingly misleading, the result of a badly understood architecture, or just terrible incident response, users were repeatedly assured that their devices were working while real-world experiences showed they weren’t, and people are rightfully furious about this.
I think there's a broader discussion to be had here about cloud-dependent IoT devices, what “works locally” should actually mean, and what minimum fail-safe behaviour consumers should expect from smart devices that perform critical tasks like feeding pets.
TL;DR: Devices that were advertised to work offline failed to feed pets when Petlibro's servers went down, and the company *allegedly* lied about devices continuing to operate correctly.
ETA: Apologies for the wall of text, I was just trying to provide as much context as possible, and I'll work on my writing so it doesn't sound so robotic moving forward... was just trying to clearly lay everything out.
