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Pet owners say smart pet feeder outage led to furry ones going unfed (arstechnica.com)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/nottheonion@lemmy.world
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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).

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[–] 9 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Yeah, there's been timed feeders longer than there's been wifi, and I'm sure the first had old-school and modern, but it's been long enough people stopped wanting to pay for both.

But even doing what your talking about, my wifi thermostat still works without wifi if I walk over to it. My smart plugs still do their normal timed schedules.

An internal clock and a tiny piece of flash memory is all it takes.

But that's like $0.05 per unit, and a corporation will always cut that corner.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 child)

    But they need an internal clock and flash memory anyway, if it can use Wi-Fi and access an API then it's just a little computer, it has all the pieces already

    Https encryption requires a system clock, and software updates require flash storage. Even just storing your Wi-Fi info requires some storage

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    Can we be sure these feeders even used https or validated the certificates? I'm sort of joking, but with how poorly designed so many IoT devices are, I wouldn't be surprised even if they did have a RTC. The hardware capabilities being present doesn't help when the real missing pieces are competence and concerns for reliability/pets/customers.

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