Wyze cameras slowly recovering from a widespread service outage

On Friday, 4AM E.T, users of Wyze cameras began to report major downtime with their home monitoring services. The service outage spiked by 8AM ET, according to Down detector, and resulted in a number of dead toy-cameras, app error messages, inaccessible smart devices, and serious data breaches with homeowners getting unsolicited camera feeds from other users. 

This is by no means Wyze's first rodeo. Only five months ago, the company had a similar security breach that allowed other people to see camera footage from your home. It took Wyze till January 2022 to discontinue the WyzeCam v1, despite Bitdefender pointing out a serious vulnerability in the device three years earlier. And in December 2019, Twelve Security discovered that a major security lapse had compromised the data of around 2.4 million Wyze customers. 

Any one of these incidents, by itself, heavily tarnishes the reputation of a security company. It came as no surprise that The New York Times was hard-pressed to withdraw their recommendation of Wyze security cameras last year. For these activities to occur repeatedly without giving adequate warnings to users is a telltale sign and does little to inspire trust. To put this into perspective, it took Wyze over five hours to respond to the recent server outage – and the Seattle-based company was quick to blame AWS.

We are aware of an issue with our AWS partner which has impacted device connection and caused login difficulties. We are taking steps to mitigate the problem on our end as we work with AWS to resolve the issue.”

– Wyze Support (Friday, 9:31 ET)

Amazon AWS has not reported having any such outage, which doesn't lend much credence to the narrative Wyze is pushing here. The downtime seems to be recovering, albeit slowly. However, Wyze has since stopped updating its forum: and users are left none the wiser about the underlying causes of this widespread crisis.

Despite the outage easing up by mid-day, the Events tab on the Wyze app persistently showed certain users the thumbnails of camera footage from other homes. Wyze had to fully disable the tab at 2:27PM ET on Friday. In an email sent through The Verge, Wyze marketing boss, Dave Crosby explained that the company was still investigating the causes of the issue. 

Wyze is certainly not going to live this down easily, as many a savvy homeowner is already ditching their cameras for more stable alternatives, such as the 3rd-gen Blink Outdoor wireless security cameras you can get on Amazon.