Internet of Starving Pets: animals go hungry after "smart feeder" fails

Rob Beschizza 5:23 am Thu Feb 27, 2020

Petnet is a $300 internet-of-things pet food bowl. Its network went down and stayed down for a week, leaving some pets to go hungry. The BBC reports that owners are livid and that it's not the first trouble Petnet's had maintaining service.

Petnet has two Twitter accounts. The official one has not tweeted since 30 August 2019 but the support account issued four tweets between 14 and 21 February about the problems experienced. In its first tweet it said a "system outage" was affecting second generation devices and asked customers not to switch off their feeder even if it appeared to be offline. … On 21 February it said smartfeeders were "returning online" and a "system reset" was in progress.

The Petnet has dismal reviews on Amazon, where the Wopet is the clear favorite: a plain old automatic feeder, no internet required.

PREVIOUSLY: Smart pet food bowl closes when pets overeat.

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