Can’t access your Wyze cam this fine Friday morning? You’re in good company.
Wyze cam users across the U.S. began reporting early Friday that their Wyze cams were unresponsive, apparently due to a widespread service outage.
Many users were unable to even launch the Wyze app—and indeed, I was one of them.
This news story is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best security cameras.
As of 11:45 a.m. Eastern time, the Wyze outage was continuing, and while I was subsequently able to log into the Wyze app (after first re-entering my login credentials), I’m still unable to view the feed of my Wyze Cam v2.
I can see my Wyze event timeline, but I can’t play back any video events, not even those that are stored locally. Update: Now my event timeline is down, too.
Happy Friday!
Ben Patterson/Foundry
An update about the outage finally appeared on the Wyze status webpage at 6:30 a.m. Pacific time, hours after the first service outages were reported.
Roughly an hour later, a new update from Wyze blamed “an issue with our AWS partner” (referring to Amazon Web Services) for the outage, while promising that “we are taking steps to mitigate the problem.”
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 was showing a spike in outage reports starting at about 5 a.m. Eastern time.
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.
This time, however, the AWS “service health” page is showing green checkmarks across the board, and service for Amazon-owned Ring appears to be functioning normally.
The Wyze outage highlights the benefits of security cameras that can record videos locally rather than in the cloud.
Wyze security cameras can store videos locally, but as we’re seeing in this most recent outage, the company’s cams are so closely tied to the cloud that a service disruption can hamper local video recording and even playback.
We’ll update this story as events unfold.
