Cats and dogs are missing meals after a popular smart feeder went down

The internet of things has a new low-water mark: it’s now skipping dinner for your dog. A Petlibro outage has knocked smart feeders, litter boxes, and fountains offline, leaving pets across the country to stare at empty bowls while their humans scroll Reddit for answers. The company insists local schedules should hold, but the reports suggest otherwise. That’s the problem with “smart” — when the cloud has a tantrum, the bowl stays empty. This story signals something bigger than one buggy gadget. We have enthusiastically outsourced basic animal care to always-on servers, trusting Wi-Fi where a simple timer once sufficed. It’s a microcosm of modern fragility: convenience layered on infrastructure that hiccups, and our dependents — furry ones included — pay the price. Petlibro will likely fix this, and the internet will move on. But the image of a baffled cat waiting by an unresponsive feeder is the perfect emblem of tech’s blind spot. The smarter the device, the dumber it looks when the network goes dark. Remember: your pet never signed a service-level agreement. It just wants lunch.