Robots are playing an increasingly important role in everyday life. Nevertheless, robots’ capabilities are still limited so far, so they regularly depend on human assistance, such as when they get stuck. In the present research, we looked at the conditions under which people are willing to help robots. We studied the bystander effect – the reduced willingness of individuals to help other humans in the presence of bystanders – in a human-robot interaction scenario. We performed an online study that provided participants with a cover story that required them to select one of two options for several situations. Critically, this cover story also included two situations that presented a robot needing help (open a door for the robot; charge the robot), once in the presence of bystanders and once with the robot depicted alone. Participants could choose between helping the robot or not. We observed that the presence of bystanders significantly reduced participants’ intention to help the robot. We also investigated the influence of participants’ gender on their intention to help. We observed no significant influence of participants’ gender overall, but exploratory analyses indicated that participants’ gender might affect the bystander effect for specific situations. To summarize, we observed a bystander effect in human-robot interaction, suggesting that helping behavior toward robots and humans may depend on similar influence factors.