Wyze Labs, a popular maker of smart home devices, has been hit by a double whammy of service outage and security breach that has left many customers frustrated and worried. The company is investigating the cause and extent of the incident, while trying to restore normal functionality to its products.
Outage affects live stream and connectivity
The outage started on Tuesday morning, when many Wyze users reported that they could not access their cameras via the app. Some cameras appeared to be offline, while others showed error messages or failed to load the live stream. Some users also complained that their app was crashing or that their devices had disappeared from their accounts.
Wyze acknowledged the issue on its service status page and attributed it to an AWS connectivity problem. AWS is Amazon Web Services, a cloud computing platform that Wyze uses to store and process data from its devices. Wyze said it was working with AWS to resolve the issue and restore service as soon as possible.
The outage lasted for more than nine hours, during which Wyze provided periodic updates on its progress. By Tuesday evening, Wyze announced that most devices should be recovered and that it would continue to monitor the situation. It also apologized for the inconvenience and thanked the customers for their patience and help.
Security issue raises privacy concerns
While the outage was ongoing, Wyze also revealed that it was investigating a security issue that could potentially compromise the privacy and security of its customers. The company did not provide any details on the nature or scope of the issue, but said it was taking it very seriously and working to fix it.
The security issue came to light after some users reported seeing footage from other people’s cameras on their app. One user claimed that he could see a camera feed from a different time zone, while another said he could see a camera feed from a different country. These reports raised alarm among Wyze users, who feared that their own cameras could be accessed by strangers or hackers.
Wyze said it was looking into these reports and asked the affected users to send them logs from their microSD cards, which store the device data. Wyze also advised the users to change their passwords and enable two-factor authentication, which adds an extra layer of security to their accounts.
Wyze promises to improve its service and security
Wyze is one of the most popular brands of smart home devices, especially cameras, because of its low prices and user-friendly features. The company claims to have more than 5 million customers and offers a range of products, such as security cameras, doorbells, thermostats, plugs, and sensors.
However, this is not the first time that Wyze has faced service and security issues. In December 2019, Wyze suffered a data breach that exposed the personal information of 2.4 million customers, including email addresses, device names, and Wi-Fi network names. Wyze apologized for the incident and said it was caused by a human error.
In January 2020, Wyze experienced another outage that affected its camera live stream and notifications. Wyze blamed the outage on a server overload and said it was working to increase its server capacity and optimize its performance.
Wyze has said that it is committed to improving its service and security and that it values the trust and feedback of its customers. The company has also said that it will provide more information on the latest incident once it completes its investigation and analysis.
