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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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It is bad design. The entire system control could be on a microcontroller inside the machine itself. There's no reason to route data through a cloud server just for basic functionality (other than greedy data farming, of course).
That's a single point of failure, and not even very reliable, for something that provides a basic necessity to a living being.
That being said, any pet owner who relies on an automated feeder and doesn't check it regularly to make sure it's working properly, is neglecting their pets. They share a portion of the responsibility here.
Still, I wish products marketed for pets were regulated better to ensure safety.
They save money by offloading the processing to your phone.
Then the process should happen on the phone locally and not by connecting to their servers which run the processes and then send commands back to the device through your phone...
I ain't arguing it's a good setup. Somewhere there's a spreadsheet showing how many dead pets they can get away with before their cost-saving strategy goes into the red.