Smart home brand Wyze Labs recently suffered through a massive service outage with users flooding the internet with reports stating their security cameras no longer work.
The issues people are experiencing vary case by case. There are posts on the Wyze subreddit where customers claim their Battery Cam Pro has gone offline multiple times, their Cam V3 is unable to connect to the internet, the Android app doesn’t work either, and so on. There’s even an instance of a user stating they received a feed from a camera that not only isn’t theirs but is from a house in a completely different time zone. Similar stories can be seen on the official forums. People on there are complaining about the mobile app crashing or how all of their devices have completely disappeared from their accounts. Suffice it to say, it’s a giant mess.
Wyze Cams having issues nation wide. #wyzedown #wyze #wyzecams pic.twitter.com/jWEnHyTZ1lFebruary 16, 2024
TheVerge in its coverage states the earliest instances started to appear at around 4 am EST according to users on the Wyze Discord channel before ramping up at 6 am. Downdetector shows outage reports peaked a little after 9 am EST before slowing down.
Service recovering
Wyze Labs is well aware of the outage. Going back to the forum post, you’ll find a company representative making constant updates every hour or so. At the time of this writing, it looks like the service is coming back.
Keep in mind the situation is not 100 percent over. People on the Discord channel say the smartphone app and cameras are working, but certain models are still down. Wyze light bulbs, in particular, seem to be stuck on an endless loading screen. Others are worried they may have lost important Event Recordings although there is a chance they aren’t. One person recounts seeing their events come back before disappearing soon after. They blame the current jitteriness of the Wyze app.
Unknown cause
It’s unknown exactly what caused the outage. The company is pointing the finger at Amazon Web Services (AWS). They claim there was an issue with Wyze’s AWS partner negatively impacting “device connection and caused login difficulties.” However, looking at the AWS Health Dashboard website, not a single issue was reported in the last week. Everything’s fine as far as the North American servers are concerned.
This isn’t the first time Wyze users have experienced random service problems. Last year, reports surfaced of people receiving “webcam feeds that weren’t theirs”, allegedly letting them see inside other people’s houses. Apparently, this was caused by a web caching issue. And if you go back even further to 2022, a bug was discovered on the Wyze Cam IoT camera that could’ve given bad actors a way to spy on homeowners.
We reached out to Wyze asking for information on the possibility of people losing Event Recordings and the security issue where users reported seeing feeds from outside cameras. This story will be updated at a later time.
If you’re looking for other options, check out TechRadar’s roundup of the best home security camera for 2024.
