Going on 5 years later and not a solution has been implemented.
Pretty sad.
I seen some [Mod Edit] saying its weak wifi, not wyze’s problem. Problem is, 8 feet from my router sit 3 cameras that randomly drop offline.
Another one about 15 feet that drops offline.
One that uses a repeater and it randomly drops offline
I have my barn on a p2p 2 mile capable setup only 500 feet from my router, it randomly drops offline. But ironically I can still access the router and other wireless equipment when the cameras drop offline.
It IS a wyze problem that should be addressed.
When it comes to the hard wired setups such as the floodlights going offline, it’s not exactly an easy option to just unplug and plug back in the offending camera, but that’s the solution wyze has decided to stand on a hill and die over.
Makes no sense to me, when a little simple coding could resolve this.
I agree - I am shocked… I have generally found Wyze to be very responsive and concerns about customer needs. This one has me stumped as to why they wont. All but the most basic arduino wifi code has checks in the code to make sure the wifi is still connected…
We’re going for the 6 year record. Maybe this request will make it to a decade.
Well, I think many of us still have WYZE equipment. Heck I bought WYZE floodlight cameras for my new house.
WYZE is still a good value for $$!
BTW, one of my secondary cams thats powered from the accessory port of my Floodlight cam wouldn’t come back online and had to hard reset from the wall light switch. Go figure, both cams are running from the same floodlight and I guess… one lost signal? Anywho, having taped down the wall light switch so family wouldn’t accidentally turn it off, means re-taping. What a pain!
I read through this whole thread again just for fun… “dead man timer”, “watchdog timer”, “maybe later wishlist” are my favorites. And pity-full excuses like its going to inconvenience offline users… (ever heard of “option / enable /disable”?) seemed like entertainment for the thread.
In all seriousness though, its pretty lame not to have a solution. And this Floodlight cam fail reminded me why we were passionate about this topic years ago. As I stated much earlier on, imagine not being at home like on vacation and the cam that would have captured the burgler failed to come back online day before. You might as well have not had a camera in such a case. I have cams in remote spots and have implemented WiFi Smart switches together with PRTG network monitor for proactive notifications. But this Floodlight problem is now a new problem to have to tackle!
Totally agree! It’s been several years now since I posted in here. Currently have my thermostat and 2 switches offline because of a provider change. I fluctuate between going with another brand (starting over would be expensive…cheap or not!) or making a 2-hour call to Wyze to get things straightened out. I just haven’t had extra time.
@felterco there appears to be some kind of watchdog built into the device (at least on the Wyze Cam V3) because on a certain occasion I caused my camera to crash (which somehow happened when triggering its siren). I could not contact it for about 22 hours 30 minutes (either via app, or pinging it in the local network). Even after rebooting the router and access points it would not get back online. But then after this period it got back online and operate normally. The camera does not provide an uptime counter, but it is a fairly safe to assume it was crashed during all this time, given the absence of recorded events in the microSD card during this time.
Now, even though there appears to be a watchdog timer, 22 hours 30 minutes is too much time, as a lot can happen in the mean time.
Nothing is a good value for the $$ if it doesn’t work.
This is a stupid simple fix (on their end)
And for security, not knowing if it works is the same as it not working.
And monitoring the cameras 24/7 to click on that button if it drops off is unreasonable.
And yes, I do pay for Cam+
The only logical reason I can think of that they haven’t addressed this in 5 years is that it costs them less. If your cameras aren’t recording, they don’t have to cloud store the data.
For them to sell this service, and, not to deal with such a base problem is fraud.
I don’t have enough knowledge of the back end programming to say easy or not, but it does seem reasonable it would be easy, and definitely their responsibility, after all, these cameras are designed to be online accessible by their proprietary app…
But the solution I’ve come to is a scheduled restart for every single camera, every 15 minutes.
And that STILL occasionally has a fails to connect issue.
Seems complete asinine I’m forced to restart my cameras every 15 minutes to avoid a loss of connectivity. Which by that method also creates a security risk in my system evwrytime a camera needlessly resets.
Gotta be honest, it actually pi$$es me off to have to create a vulnerability to avoid a larger monitoring issue.
Most users is the key word… Most users don’t have a clue what WiFi even is or how to adjust anything related to it. As a 20+ year IT professional I know this for a fact. Adding in a reconnect string is so easy to do and will make it easier for people with questionable connections to keep their cameras online. A very value added upgrade for WYZE users.
That’s a drastic approach. If you have to do that why even put up with the bad cameras? At this point, I suspect most of Wyze development staff is gone. Do they even have the sources? Notice that lately, no Wyze employee is around anymore.
I agree and as a 30yr IT professional this is a simple few hour fix by qualified programmers. The cameras should NEVER have be released without this reset feature. Shame on you WYZE …fix this, so easy and will save your uses 1000s of hours of wasted time. This should be a level 2 priority 1 issue.
Please, please, please…design a solution to automatically reconnect a device after if/when it’s gone offline. Especially for outdoor devices which are not easily in reach such as my Flood Cam v2.
The unit had power, and it already knows my wifi network (which was fine)…so why on earth should I need to spend an hour going through a huge list of possible fixes, press reset buttons on the camera, or switch my power off? Surely, there’s a software design solution for this. I’m a user experience designer…I’m confident you can fix this and make it better for all of your customers.
I’m not going to re-type everything I’ve already sent via email to your help, but pasting some notes:
As mentioned, these are exterior lights/cameras (meaning, they’re high up on outside walls where one would need a ladder to reset them), and many exterior junction boxes (such as mine), don’t have individual switches to power them on and off (so turning off my breaker kills my entire house, all Alexa devices and bulbs, and now I have to spend time fixing those). And what if I’m out of town and my security camera goes offline? How do you expect someone to be pushing physical reset buttons on the device and turning breakers on/off remotely??
In addition to all the issues noted above, forcing people to go through all of the steps below will likely take/waste 1+ hours of time (which I can tell you I did today).
*Note: My cam is now fine and back online. I’m writing as I’d like to know how to fix this issue in the future when it happens again (this has already happened twice).
Issue: Yesterday, my Flood Cam v2 went offline. The message in the app read “This device is offline.”
I tried…
Tapping the “refresh” (reconnect?) button in the app and it didn’t do anything
Tapping “Restart Camera” in the app and it didn’t do anything
Tapping “Reset Services” in the app and it didn’t do anything
And…holding the RESET button down on the actual light/camera for 10 seconds, and it didn’t do anything
I can’t even remember if turning the power off and on to the camera fixed it, but at some point I had to Delete the device entirely from the app to add it again.
**Again, my question is: Can this “device offline” issue be fixed in an easier manner???
I really don’t want to have to get a ladder out and climb up high to deal with the Reset button, and I also don’t want to have to turn the power off (I don’t have a switch for this, so I have to turn off my whole house…which causes problems with my wifi and all my Alexa devices). And what if I was on vacation?
This really shouldn’t require so much hard resetting…the device should be smart enough to reconnect if/when this occurs.
Thanks-
[Mod Note]:Your topic was merged to an existing Wishlist request for better visibility and consistency in grouping similar requests (see link below). Please remember to scroll up to the top and click the VOTE button to show your support.
I’ve been following this and am glad to see others have the same issues I’ve had in hopes that this will be addressed.
What we need is a simple settings toggle or heck just program it in permanently that follows this kind of logic:
x = user defined minutes to wait
If(not connected to wifi)
{
wait x minutes
try connecting to wifi again
if(still not connected to wifi)
{
reset camera
}
}
From my many years being with WYZE there are many occasions where the only thing that fixes the cameras that are currently showing offline is by power cycling the cameras themselves. Nothing else brings them back on whether it’s resetting my router entirely or whatever else.
Like so many in this post have stated, many of us have our cameras mounted up high or long distances away where we can’t easily physically reset them. Yes there may be additional products or solutions that could be used but if they would simply have someone program in this fix it would save a great deal of their customers time and money and avoid our frustrations.
I hope that this is indeed still “in progress” WYZE. It would go a long way in the trusted reliability in your cameras. Which you can have all the fancy features and bells and whistles you want, but in my opinion none of that amounts to squat if the camera is offline and isn’t recording. Above all else when it comes to cameras I want to be able to trust that it will record when I need it to. Well… I say above all else, but let’s be honest price might be above that because otherwise I’d buy a really expensive camera system that I know wouldn’t have this issue. I want to think that WYZE can and will provide both value and reliability here though…
I think Wyze implemented this on the one of the cameras recently and it was noticed by @grapefruityoda that there were some unintended consequences.
@grapefruityoda didn’t you say that you found V3s were restarting themselves after a half hour of losing connectivity now with recent firmware updates and that this then caused some problems with SD card payback/recording?
I kind of wish they would make this feature an optional toggle. I personally don’t want my cameras automatically restarting when they lose connectivity. If my cameras go offline, there is only like a 5% chance that they need to restart to connect again. 95% of the time it’s either an ISP or AWS outage. Other than that, my network is extraordinary and my Wyze devices basically never go offline, so forcing them to restart just causes extra issues, such as messing up the SD card recording.
It used to be that if a criminal jammed your Wi-Fi or something so you couldn’t get cloud events, at least everything would still record to the SD card. But if they implement this, then when they jam your Wi-Fi, it will also force all your cameras to restart and when they restart they can’t authenticate with the wyze server because there’s no Wi-Fi which means they probably won’t even record to the SD card anymore, and that will be a problem because now there won’t be any backup recording to the SD card since it wasn’t able to authenticate after restarting the camera. I don’t like that. I would personally turn this feature off if they gave me a toggle option to opt out of it. But I understand some people really need it, especially if they have a bad ISP or bad router with a lot of connectivity problems and their wyze cams going offline frequently. Forcing a camera to restart automatically when it loses. A connection will be super helpful, especially for people who have these for secondary homes that are far away. But it feels more like a security vulnerability for my situation personally, where my wyze cams are basically never offline. So if they do go offline forcing them to restart and possibly stop recording to the SD card is more of a security issue for me then leaving them offline until I get to them.
So, don’t get me wrong. I’m not against this wish list. I just want it to be optional with a toggle. Don’t restart my cameras automatically without me agreeing that I want that camera to be restarted automatically. I feel like that’s a fair request.
Though, @grapefruityoda I seem to recall that you were suggesting that even after your camera restarted, it was still recording to the SD card, just that it was saving under a different date and time after the restart. Is that correct? If so, that may be a workable option for me as long as there is still a recording somewhere. I’m just afraid that after a restart it stops recording entirely to the SD card as used to be the case in the past, or was assumed to be the case. Maybe it was always saving under a Different date and time instead and we just didn’t notice And assumed it wasn’t recording at all because it wasn’t showing up in the playback timeline in the right spot.
Likewise. I have not encountered a disconnected cam unless I myself power reboot my router.
I thought the reset would not affect a working cam, but one that cannot be reached. Seems there should be checks to see if cam is down or local network is down. Maybe that is not feasible. Testing by the beta team should be required. Optional switch is a good option.
The 12h10min test I did was only for Cam V3 specifically as I do not know how the other cameras firmware logic work. However, there have been reports that V3 Pro and Cam Pan V2 are impacted as well so I’m assuming if you are on 4.xx.13.0416 firmware family or newer then there’s this new “OG behaviour” which restarts the camera by itself after 30 minute of internet outage.
For Cam V3, if you are on firmware 4.36.13.0416 then it will automatically restart after 30 minute of internet outage. When it restarts itself, it will try to establish a link to a NTP server to sync the time, but because there’s no internet then it will start recording into a date based on the firmware build (this date is unique because it will change practically every firmware). On the Wyze app, you will need to go back to that specific build date to review the footage. As far as I know, it was only able to record the first 11h9min. Afterwards, the remaining footage of 1h1min was corrupted and it couldn’t be playback on the Wyze app.
My Cam V3 never had any problem reconnecting back to the internet / router regardless of which firmware. I had turned off my internet to test numerous times and it reconnected everytime without fail. Also, there’s no authentication to record to micro SD for my Cam V3. As long as there’s power then it will record to the micro SD, but having it record to the correct folder / date is another matter.
The latest Cam V3 beta firmware 4.36.14.2259 reverted back this change and it no longer automatically restart itself after 30min of internet outage like 4.36.11.8391. Furthermore, the footage wasn’t corrupted either as it can playback the full 12h10min test.
Cam V3 Firmware build date
4.36.11.8391 firmware build date is January 3rd 2024
4.36.13.0416 firmware build date is July 4th 2024
4.36.14.2259 beta firmware build date is December 30th 2024. When they eventually release the stable firmware then it will change again.