A maintained record of consumer and social robots that died — discontinued, abandoned, or bricked when their makers collapsed or their cloud servers were switched off. This is the evidence behind our server-shutdown risk rating: robot mortality is not hypothetical.
Death toll updated as new cases are documented. Open data: this record is published in the CC-BY dataset. Last updated 2026-07-10.
Digital Dream Labs, which had revived Anki's Vector after 2019, saw its cloud servers go dark for over a year; in July 2026 a court placed its digital assets under a receiver. Cloud voice features are unreliable; the robot's future again rests with the community.
Rescue: Escape Pod — an official self-hosted server owners can run to keep Vector working locally.
Embodied ceased operations in December 2024. Moxie depended entirely on cloud servers for its conversational AI; when they were switched off at the end of January 2025 the roughly $800 robots stopped working, leaving families to explain to children that their robot friend had died.
Rescue: OpenMoxie — a community project that lets owners re-flash units to run without Embodied's servers.
Amazon discontinued the business version of Astro barely a year after launch, disabling the units and offering refunds. The consumer Astro continues as an invite-only preview — but the episode showed even a trillion-dollar maker will brick a robot line.
Vorwerk wound down Neato Robotics in 2023. App and Wi-Fi cloud features for the connected models were subsequently sunset, degrading smart functionality even where the vacuums still physically clean.
Despite selling millions of units and raising around $200M, Anki collapsed in April 2019 after a funding round fell through. Cloud features were left in limbo until Digital Dream Labs acquired the assets in 2020 — a reprieve that later ran into its own trouble.
Rescue: Assets acquired by Digital Dream Labs (2020); see the Vector entry.
Billed as the first social robot for the home and funded with roughly $72M, Jibo's servers were shut down in 2019. In a widely reported farewell, the robots delivered a goodbye message and a final dance before their core functions went dark.
The much-hyped laundry-folding robot's maker filed for bankruptcy in 2019 with the product never shipping in volume, after reported investment running into the tens of millions.
Mayfield Robotics, backed by Bosch, shut down in 2018 and cancelled Kuri before mass deliveries, refunding pre-orders. A polished home robot that never reached owners at all.
Sony discontinued the original Aibo in 2006 and ended repair support in 2014. With no official parts, owners in Japan held Shinto-style funerals for units that could no longer be fixed — the first mass example of robot mortality. (Sony later relaunched Aibo in 2018.)
Rescue: Third-party repair shops kept some units alive; Sony relaunched a new Aibo line in 2018.
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