Petlibro Smart Feeder Outage Disrupted App Controls and Left Some Pets Waiting for Food

York Wu, founder and CEO of Petlibro, has provided additional details about the outage that temporarily prevented users from controlling their smart pet feeders through the company’s companion app. The disruption reportedly left some pet owners unable to remotely feed or monitor their animals.

Petlibro, a Shenzhen-based company owned by Shenzhen Libro Technology Co., first acknowledged the service outage at 5 a.m. Pacific time on Tuesday, August 11. The company announced at 7 p.m. PT on Wednesday that the issue had been resolved. However, some users later reported continuing problems, with additional complaints appearing as of August 13.

In a blog post published Saturday, Wu apologized for the outage and acknowledged the “frustration and concern” it caused. He confirmed that problems with Petlibro’s cloud servers were responsible for the disruption.

The outage was caused by an issue with the cloud servers that caused a backlog of data requests, overloading system memory and bringing down device services in the process. After successfully restarting the cloud service, the backlog returned and the system went down again. At that point, the team conducted systematic troubleshooting of the cloud service system, identified the underlying issue, patched a solution, and closely monitored the slow increase in traffic toward a stable recovery.

The outage prevented the Petlibro app from connecting to users’ devices and stopped the feeders from communicating with the service. App-based features—including on-demand feeding, operation history, recordings, notifications, and video access—were unavailable during the incident.

Wu said Petlibro is “strengthening demand capacity” and “preparing audit protocols to search the backend and work to resolve similar discrepancies.”

Petlibro outage timeline

At 5:20 a.m. PT on Tuesday, August 11, Wu said Petlibro identified “a critical error” affecting app login and device controls. By 6:20 a.m. PT, “app functionality was restored and the system began processing the large backlog of data requests caused by the outage.”

However, the system failed again 23 minutes later after a surge of incoming requests exceeded the service’s connection capacity, according to Wu.

At 8:04 a.m. PT, Petlibro restored basic functionality and began bringing other services back online. About an hour later, the company reduced the app’s functionality because of slow loading times, Wu said.