Petlibro accused of “gaslighting” users over smart pet feeder outage

Petlibro says feeders perform scheduled feedings offline. Users report otherwise. 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, identif