Thousands of pets miss dinner after popular smart feeder crashes

Petlibro, a popular manufacturer of smart devices for pets, has experienced a system outage that is preventing some of its products from performing scheduled tasks, including feeding. The outage began Tuesday, with users reporting that Petlibro feeders, water fountains, and litter boxes have gone offline.

The company says that settings and schedules stored locally on devices should continue working normally during the outage. However, numerous users report that their RFID and Granary feeders have missed scheduled feedings, while some Dockstream water fountains have stopped pumping and Luma litter boxes have failed to run cleaning cycles.

The outage is particularly concerning for pet owners who are away from home and rely on connected devices to care for their animals. Some users have also reported problems with the Petlibro app itself, including difficulties reconnecting their devices.

Petlibro acknowledged the issue Tuesday, saying it was experiencing a "service issue affecting some Petlibro app functions." The company said it was working to restore service and bring affected functionality back online in stages.

In an update Wednesday at 2:30 p.m. ET, Petlibro said that "much of our service is restored" as it continued working to return the app to full operation. Some users subsequently reported that their devices had started working again, although others were still unable to reconnect them to the app.

Petlibro did not immediately provide further details about the cause of the outage. The Verge also contacted the company for comment but had not received a response at the time of publication.