For about 48 hours this week, some Petlibro customers experienced problems with their automatic pet feeders. Owners on social media said their animals had missed meals.
The company’s smart feeders, which dispense measured portions on a schedule set through a phone app, went into a service disruption that began around 5:00 AM PT on 11 August. Affected functions included app access and remote control of devices.
Petlibro reported partial recovery at 5:56 AM, then “most services returned to normal” by 1:20 PM, then moved to monitoring at 4:06 PM. At 7:00 PM the same day, it logged a fresh service issue affecting app access and responsiveness. Engineering applied stability updates at 9:33 PM and began restoring services in stages. By 8:30 AM PT on 12 August, login and data viewing were back, but device controls, device setup and connectivity were still being restored.
Downdetector reports climbed again on the morning of 12 August, marking a second consecutive day of user complaints. Petlibro continued restoring service through the day, and at 7:00 PM PT on 12 August it declared the incident resolved, saying it had confirmed system stability after monitoring a full operating cycle. The company said feeding and cleaning schedules already saved to devices kept running locally throughout the disruption, though some settings changed during the outage may not have saved, and some activity records and video may be permanently unavailable.
Petlibro, founded in 2019 and based in California, has sold Wi-Fi connected feeders, fountains and litter boxes, with feeders and fountains typically priced between $30 and $150 and its newer AI-powered litter box priced at around $600.
Cloud outages hit connected products constantly, and most of the time the consequence is inconvenience. A lamp stays off. A thermostat holds its last setting. The user is annoyed and moves on, but feeding is different.
Petlibro appears to have handled the disclosure reasonably well, publishing a timestamped status page with specific guidance and following through to a clear resolution rather than letting the incident trail off unexplained.
The Petlibro incident lands in a year that has made connected-hardware dependency concrete for a lot of consumers. Belkin announced in July 2025 that it would end support for most of its Wemo smart home line, and shut down the Wemo cloud service on 31 January 2026. Affected plugs, switches, sensors, baby monitors and appliances lost remote access, schedules and voice integrations, with only a handful of Thread and HomeKit-compatible devices surviving locally.
