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posted by martyb on Wednesday April 29 2020, @05:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the its-dead-jim dept.

After prolonged service outage, Petnet shuts down, citing coronavirus:

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.

[...] "Last week on April 14, 2020, we briefed all of our customers regarding one of our third-party connected vendor's inability to fully resource their company and stay functionally online," the message reads. "As of this writing, this situation remains unresolved but we are confident it will be overcome soon."

But due to the exceptional circumstances the COVID-19 pandemic has created, Petnet went on, many of its vendors—largely startups like itself—were "severely and negatively affected in their day to day operations." In short: the funding dried up. Due to a lack of funds, Petnet said, it "re-prioritized and reorganized [its] resources," including:

  • We have furloughed 100% of our remaining staff
  • We have ceased all future product development, including bug fixes
  • We have turned off all non-infrastructure related expenses
  • We have terminated our office lease and are working remotely
  • We have applied for all available CARES stimulus funding

Previously:
(2020-02-28) Petnet's Smart Pet Feeder System Back after Week-Long Outage
(2016-07-30) Cats, Dogs Go Hungry as Internet-Connected PetNet Plays Dead


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  • (Score: 2, Troll) by VLM on Wednesday April 29 2020, @04:35PM (1 child)

    by VLM (445) on Wednesday April 29 2020, @04:35PM (#988236)

    In general we're gonna see a lot of control fraud, although on a percentage basis it'll probably seem low. So highly likely this specific individual case isn't control fraud, but there's a lot of fraud going on out there to look for and expect to find in the future.

    I'm just saying the chinese flu is a convenient excuse to cover up a lot of things. This specific example seems to be the company already died, and to save face we're gonna blame the beer virus as the sole cause.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2020, @05:42PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2020, @05:42PM (#988263)

    And take any free money available:

    We have applied for all available CARES stimulus funding