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Pet owners say smart pet feeder outage led to furry ones going unfed
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2026
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Sounds like a dumb way to feed your pet that the device can't work without the cloud. Nothing new but still you have to be real stupid to buy a device that will one day be cut off when the company abandons support.
Ah yes, the classic "the stupid consumers are stupid" argument.
This was sold as being an offline-capable device. It even has battery slots for power outages.
Perhaps instead of shitting on people for buying something they thought would be nice and work well, we shit on the company that can't even give a pet feeder an on-device offline schedule after selling people on a device that's supposed to work offline and even during power outages.
And figure out how we can hack it and enable folks to control the hardware they own, because they weren't stupid for buying a pet feeder. The company that runs it just does so in a moronic way.
(I don't own one of these, but I have considered it a few times, and this just pisses me off)
So is it poor design or cases where users didn't put batteries in?
Any cloud connected device that stops functioning when there is a outage is stupid. Its stupid to buy one.
What about a device that can function offline?
Yes. That is what I'm saying.
But that's what they bought. That's what was advertised and sold to them.
It was just false advertising.
I've bought two cloud connected devices that promised manual control. Only one did. It was the first thing I did was verify it was true by never using the cloud part of it.