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

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.”

Petlibro accused of “atrocious customer service”

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).

In his blog, Wu wrote:

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.”