I turned my WiFi network off for about an hour because I moved an access point to a different room, and then decided to move it back to its original location.
This access point was for my main WiFi network. All my IoT devices are on a separate physical network with different access points, different network cables, different switches. I turned ALL the access points off for testing purposes, and then powered them all back on when I was done.
When I turned everything back on, all of my devices (2019 Wyze bulbs, Wyze color bulbs bought in 2020, Wyze color bulbs bought in 2024, Wyze indoor plugs from 2019 and 2020, Wyze outdoor plugs bought in 2024, and Wyze smart switches bought in 2023) came back on and started working immediately EXCEPT for the four Wyze bulbs from 2019.
I went through the trouble shooting steps of doing a factory reset on the trouble bulbs, deleted them from the Wyze app, and left them in a drawer for three days. Then I went through the steps of adding them to the Wyze app.
Each bulb connected to the app. The app showed them to be online. I could turn them on/off, adjust color temperature, and adjust brightness, from the app, HOWEVER the bulbs themselves would do nothing.
Eventually the bulbs would pulsate as though they were ready to be paired, despite still showing as online in the app.
I assumed a network issue, so I ran tcpdump on my firewall to generate packet captures, and look at them in Wireshark. I also used tcpdump to view the network activity of the bulbs in real time.
What I found is twofold :
(1) The working bulbs have almost zero network traffic, except for when I issue a command from the app, which is the expected behavior
(2) The trouble bulbs have nearly constant traffic to the Wyze cloud (api.wyze.com hosted at Amazon AWS). In Wireshark, I was able to see that the connections to Wyze were being rejected by the Wyze cloud.
So unless my eyes deceive me, it looks like Wyze rejects connections from old bulbs once those old bulbs have a significant network interruption, but the bulbs are otherwise in working condition.
If I were a nefarious person, what I would do is set up some sort of logic in my cloud servers that would reject old bulbs that had lost connectivity for more than 30 minutes because most customers would assume the bulb stopped working for reasons related to whatever caused the network outage, and not because Wyze decided it was time for those customers to buy new bulbs.
I’m not trying to uncover any grand conspiracy, I just want the light bulbs that are still in working condition that I already paid for to continue to be allowed to function properly by the company I bought the bulbs from.
