Wyze security cameras were down for much of the day Friday as the company wrestled with a major service outage and a “possible security issue,” while at least one Wyze user said they could see video events from strangers in the Wyze app.
Update (2/20/2023): Wyze now admits that it exposed private video events to more than 13,000 of its users.
Update (2/17/2023): Wyze co-founder Dave Crosby sent the following statement to TechHive on Friday evening, in which he disclosed that more than a dozen Wyze owners saw thumbnails of video events from other users:
After an AWS outage this morning, our servers got overloaded and it corrupted some user data. We have now identified a security issue where some users were able to see thumbnails of cameras that were not their own in the Events tab. Fortunately, they were not able to view live streams or watch these videos, only the thumbnails were visible.
So far we’ve collected 14 reports of this happening, but we are currently identifying all affected users. These affected users will be notified asap. We will also send notification to all Wyze users explaining what happened.
As soon as we saw these reports we took down the Events tab. We then added in an extra layer of verification for each user before they could see thumbnails. To be extra safe, we are now force logging out all users who have used the Wyze app today to reset tokens.
We will explain in more detail once we finish investigating exactly how this happened and further steps we will take to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Again, we are very sorry for the inconvenience today. Thanks to everyone who helped report incidents and helped get devices back online. Our deepest apologies to everyone affected.
Original story follows…
Wyze co-founder Dave Crosby has shared an update on Reddit, announcing that while Wyze cams are “starting to come back online or live viewing,” the company is “restricting access to the Events tab while we investigate a possible security issue.”
This news story is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best security cameras.
Crosby’s statement arrived after a Wyze user on Reddit said they were seeing video events from someone else in the Wyze app.
“This isn’t my camera, isn’t my house and the time zone is 3 hours different than mine,” the user wrote.
Crosby blamed the service outage, which began roughly around 5 a.m. Eastern time, on “an issue with our partner AWS,” referring to Amazon Web Services.
Wyze cameras were down for much of the day Friday as the company dealt with a service outage.
Wyze cameras were down for much of the day Friday as the company dealt with a service outage.
Ben Patterson/Foundry
Wyze cameras were down for much of the day Friday as the company dealt with a service outage.
Ben Patterson/Foundry
Ben Patterson/Foundry
The most recent update on the Wyze status page, posted at 11:28 a.m. PT, said that “our metrics are showing continued improvement for device connection recovery,” and suggested power-cycling your Wyze device if it still isn’t working.
That said, word that at least one Wyze user was seeing video events from another user is alarming enough to warrant unplugging your Wyze cam until the security breach is sorted out.
It’s not clear exactly how widespread the Wyze outage is, but the Wyze subreddit was lit up with complaints Friday, while Down Detector’s Wyze page shows a spike in outage reports starting at about 5 a.m. Eastern time.
My own Wyze Cam v2 was down as of 6:30 a.m. ET Friday morning, leaving me unable to view the cam’s live feed or play back locally stored security videos.
By 4 p.m. ET, my Wyze Cam was working again, but there were no video events listed in the Events tab, presumably because Wyze was still blocking events.
This isn’t the first time that an Amazon Web Services issue has knocked out Wyze cams. An AWS outage in December 2021 took down Wyze cams and other Wyze smart devices for more than 12 hours, with the outage also slamming Slack, Asana, and other web-based services.
During Friday’s outage, however, the AWS “service health” page was showing green checkmarks across the board, and service for Amazon-owned Ring appeared to be functioning normally.
There have also been other occurrences of security cam users seeing video footage from strangers in their smart apps. In May 2021, Eufy blamed a “software bug” for a security breach in which EufyCam users saw video events from other Eufy users in their event histories.
Updated shortly after publication with new developments, including word of a “possible security issue.”
Author: Ben Patterson, Senior Writer
Ben has been writing about technology and consumer electronics for more than 20 years. A PCWorld contributor since 2014, Ben joined TechHive in 2019, where he covers smart speakers, soundbars, and other smart and home-theater devices. You can follow Ben on Twitter.