Smart home brand Wyze Labs recently suffered a massive service outage with users flooding the internet with reports that their security cameras have stopped working.
The problems people face vary from case to case. There are messages on the Wyze subreddit where customers claim that their Battery Cam Pro has gone offline multiple times, their Cam V3 cannot connect to the internet, the Android app is also not working, and so on. There is even one instance of a user indicating they received a feed from a camera that not only isn’t theirs, but also from a house in a completely different time zone. Similar stories can be seen on the official forums. People there complain about the mobile app crashing or all their devices completely disappearing from their accounts. Suffice it to say, it’s a gigantic mess.
Wyze Cams is having nationwide problems. #wyzedown #wyze #wyzecams pic.twitter.com/jWEnHyTZ1lFebruary 16, 2024
The edge the reporting states that the earliest cases started appearing around 4 a.m. EST according to users on the Wyze Discord channel, before ramping up at 6 a.m. Down detector shows that outage reports peaked just after 9am EST before slowing down.
Service restores
Wyze Labs is well aware of the outage. If you go back to the forum post, you’ll see that a company representative is making constant updates about every hour. At the time of writing this, it appears the service is returning.
Please note that the situation is not 100 percent over yet. People on the Discord channel say the smartphone app and cameras work, but certain models are still unavailable. Wyze lights in particular seem to be stuck on an endless loading screen. Others worry they may have lost important event recordings, even though there’s a chance they may not. One person reports seeing his events replay before disappearing shortly afterwards. They blame the current nervousness on the Wyze app.
Unknown cause
It is not known exactly what caused the malfunction. The company points the finger at Amazon Web Services (AWS). They claim there was an issue with Wyze’s AWS partner, which negatively impacted “device connectivity and caused login issues.” However, looking at the AWS Health Dashboard website, not a single issue has been reported in the past week. Everything is fine as far as the North American servers are concerned.
This isn’t the first time Wyze users have experienced random service issues. Last year, reports surfaced of people receiving “webcam feeds that weren’t their own,” allegedly allowing them to see into other people’s homes. Apparently this was caused by a web cache issue. And if you GEven further back to 2022, a bug was discovered in the Wyze Cam IoT camera that could have given bad actors a way to spy on homeowners.
We reached out to Wyze asking for information about the possibility of people losing event recordings and about the security issue where users reported seeing feeds from remote cameras. This story will be updated at a later date.
If you’re looking for other options, check out Ny Breaking’s roundup of the best home security cameras for 2024.