After prolonged service outage, Petnet shuts down, citing coronavirus

Enlarge / You're just going to have to feed this furry friend the old-fashioned way. Before his sad eyes scour your soul. (credit: Petnet)

Cloud-connected, "smart" automated pet-feeder system Petnet has had a rough spring. The service not only went offline in February, but all its customer service vanished, too, leaving users in the dark until the company apologized and pushed a patch more than a week later. The service briefly returned for some users but fell off again in March. Now, after weeks of silence, the company is blaming COVID-19 for driving it offline for good-even though its problems started weeks or months before the novel coronavirus became a significant concern.

Several Petnet customers began reaching out to Ars during the second and third weeks of April to report that, once again, not only were their feeders not working, but also they couldn't reach anyone at Petnet about it. Everyone's feeders didn't go offline at the same time but seemed to fail in slow sequence over the period between March 26 and April 13.

The company emailed its customers on March 26, blaming the novel coronavirus for outages and delays. The message, titled, "Petnet: Impact of COVID-19," read:

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