Text settings Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only Learn more Minimize to nav Petlibro founder and CEO York Wu provided more information about an outage that left users unable to control their smart pet feeders through the companion app and, in some reported cases, left them with hungry pets.
Petlibro, a company owned by Shenzhen, China-headquartered firm Shenzhen Libro Technology Co., first acknowledged the outage on Tuesday at 5 am PT. At 7 pm PT on Wednesday, Petlibro said the outage was resolved. Notably, some people online reported different information at the time, and some claimed to still have problems as of August 13.
In a blog post on Saturday that included an apology and acknowledgement of the “frustration and concern” the outage caused, Wu confirmed that problems with Petlibro’s cloud server caused the outage:
The outage was due to cloud server issues that caused a backlog of data requests, overloading the system memory and bringing down device service in the process. After successfully restarting the cloud service, the backlog reoccurred 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 then closely monitored the slow upscale of traffic towards stable recovery.
Because of this outage, the app was no longer able to connect to devices and as a result device communication was not possible. Services related to the app, including on-demand actions, operation history, records, notifications, and videos, were unavailable.
Wu noted that Petlibro has “increased demand capacity” and is “preparing an audit protocol to search our backend and work to resolve any similar inconsistencies.”
Wu said that at 5:20 am PT on Tuesday, August 11, a “critical error occurred affecting app login and control.” At 6:20 am PT, “app functionality was restored, and the system began to process a large backlog of data requests resulting from the outage.” But 23 minutes later, “a flood of incoming requests overwhelmed connection capacity, and the system failed again,” per Wu.
At 8:04 am PT “basic functionality was restored,” and Petlibro started restoring other services, Wu said. About an hour later, “the app’s loading time slowed,” so Petlibro decided to “scale back functionality,” the exec said.
On Wednesday night, Petlibro’s “development team identified a cache issue and disabled service to remedy the issue,” and at 11:43 pm PT on Wednesday, “a solution to the cache issue was implemented, and service was reactivated.”
“Over the course of the night, we continued to observe performance as more devices reconnected before returning to pre-failure levels the next morning,” Wu said. “While much of the service was restored by this point, we continued to operate in a crisis setting until we were able to experience a full cycle of demand to guarantee consistent performance.”
During and after the outage, multiple people online claimed they were unaware that Petlibro was having technical difficulties for a time because they didn’t receive any emails from the company. One Reddit user subsequently accused the firm of “atrocious customer service.”
Wu’s blog claims that during the outage, Petlibro “sent five emails to active customers with connected devices, posted four updates to both Reddit and Instagram.” Petlibro also created a status update page, which Wu said it will keep online.
One of the most intriguing aspects of the outage centers on Petlibro’s claims that its smart pet feeders perform scheduled feedings when offline, something that multiple purported users reported wasn’t the case during the outage (examples here, here, and here).
Our products are designed to carry out pre-scheduled routines like feeding and self-cleaning on their own, independent of the app, and this functioned for the vast majority of devices. We are actively reviewing isolated reports where a routine may not have performed as expected to determine if any secondary factors were involved.
Despite Wu’s post, there are users online seeking replacement pet feeders and criticizing Petlibro’s response. Due to conflicting reports regarding whether Petlibro emailed customers and scheduled feedings worked offline, some have accused the firm of “gaslighting” customers.
“[D]on’t gaslight your users by downplaying the severity of the incident,” someone wrote in a discussion of Wu’s blog on the Petlibro Reddit community.
“During a crisis, you should exaggerate the scale of the issue rather than downplaying it. Don’t tell people only a small number of users are affected. Don’t tell people offline schedules continued to run. Because if someone whose device is down, and they get that announcement, they will become irate.”
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