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).
Some cats are gobblers, some are grazers. Currently we have two gobblers, and one obligate grazer who throws up if she eats more than a tablespoon or so of food at a time. The logistics involved in making sure she gets enough without the other two stealing her food are . . . tedious.
The gobbler tendency may show up more often in rescue cats, who are likely to have been through rough patches here and there—we’ve never taken in a cat who was less than eight months old, so their habits are set before they get to us. Or it may just be a genetic quirk.