Can't Tell You Enough How Dangerous It Is Right Now

Cameras
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Just yesterday we had a gentleman try to get into our backyard. He’s been around for a week or so but yesterday he actually went onto our property and the dog chased him away.

Police were notified.

Needless to say, my wife is having fits that the cameras are down, and I am too.

PLEASE FIX ASAP!

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The timing of this couldn’t be any worse for us either. We have an active burglary ring in our area and last night we caught one of their crews on a Wyze cam at 3:20 a.m. This morning I wake up to find that none of my cams are responsive, no notifications, no events recorded as of midnight, several cameras reporting Offline or no connection, can’t turn any of them on or off, can only view live feeds on 2 out of 13 cams, the rest are bricked.

And apparently this has been happening for over 6 hours and still not a peep from Wyze.

When I woke up this morning I didn’t know anything was wrong and was thinking about buying another Wyze cam to add coverage to a certain area that I can’t see well. Then I found out that their entire system was down. Came here to see what was up only to find that 6 hours later, not a single word from Wyze.

Now I’m thinking about buying a Ring cam instead of another Wyze cam. Still haven’t decided but I do have several ecosystems precisely because of this. Wyze, Ring, Nest, Govee, Google, myQ and a couple others.

I have to say, out of all of those, the least reliable and one that goes down the most and has the most issues is, BY FAR, Wyze. When it works it’s great but it screws up sooooo often and has so many glitches that it’s really disconcerting.

And now I have no idea if anyone was creeping around overnight again. This was a crew of 4, likely the gangs that have been reported on nationwide news. Legitimately dangerous people. And my surveillance system is completely blind and was apparently off all night and is still down.

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Careful with ring too. Our Ring door bell is useless.

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If you have real security concerns, Wyze cameras should have never been an option. Ultimately you get what you pay for and this latest fiasco certainly proves that.

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I’ve had a Ring doorbell for a while. Have yet to experience a single issue. Have other Ring products too and they have been flawless. I know it’s only a matter of time until something goes down or has a problem but with Wyze it’s almost constant. I have 13 cameras and it’s a rare day when I don’t have a problem with at least one of them. My Ring stuff on the other hand, no problems.

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I have an alarm also but it’s not Wyze. I am also going to put up a couple of Ring cams to have some redundancy built in for every time Wyze goes down.

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Re-typed and lost post.

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I’ve never seen a complete Ring outage like we are all experiencing with Wyze this morning. I’ve noticed that sometimes the Ring doorbell is slow to alert and by the time I get a notification and check the feed, all I see is either a person walking away or a box that was left. But I also understand that this is the nature of data transmission. There will always be some delay. The signal has to go from the cam/doorbell to my router, then to my internet access point, then to my ISP, then to the AWS servers, then a similar path from there to my app (a rough and very crude explanation of what happens, but it still takes some time for the data to travel). This will happen with pretty much any internet-connected device.

But a complete outage like this that is so far going on 9 or 10 hours and counting? Never seen that with Ring.

This morning I woke up planning on ordering another Wyze OG cam. After this disaster, I just placed an order for two Ring Indoor cams instead.

I plan on eventually having two almost identical and parallel camera ecosystems so that if one goes down I can just switch to the other.

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Good plan. However, one of the systems should be a completely WIRED system that is totally local (in other words, NOT internet dependent). No WiFi based camera system should be considered a “REAL” security camera system.

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I do apologize for the outage. I hope everyone is back online, please let me know if you aren’t.

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Apologies always come too late from Wyze. I really wish Wyze would stop focusing on new product development and put those resources into security for the products they already have. I just saw today that some people’s thumbnails ended up being seen on other people’s cameras. What the heck?! This stuff should never happen, ever!

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Agreed.

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Then why does it keep happening over and over?!

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I am unable to answer that.

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Of course you aren’t. Even the people that know the answer, won’t answer.

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Lack of Quality Control, the Alpha testers are non-existent, because they got the public as Beta testers which may or may not catch issues.

The real testers are the consumers sadly…

Wyze doesn’t care what they release and it shows

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Wyze claims it does regression testing. It doesn’t seem like it. How else can previously fixed bugs reappear? And now this latest failure uncovers what else is missing; they don’t stress test their servers.

I even suspect they have developers slip-streaming untested fixes.

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It isn’t a matter of stress testing servers. You size your service for normal load and some overhead. Having every camera in the country trying to come back online at the same time isn’t something they’re going to size for. Note in this case they aren’t sizing literal servers, they’re sizing compute power with AWS, you pay for a certain amount of CPU time, storage, etc. You can spin up additional VMs and processing power on demand but the amount they’d need to have everything back online in minutes would be massive and expensive. It would seem some more capacity is in order though, I’ve noticed the app and cameras are a bit slower and less responsive even on previous days, when there was no outage or AWS issues.

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I’ve got a couple of Ring cams (not doorbells) and while they seem to be more reliable, there are two things to keep in mind with them:

  1. They don’t continuously record, unless activated. The best you can do with a Ring is have them take a snapshot once a minute (every 5 minutes for battery operated cams). The lack of continuous recording means you can’t go back and look for anything it might have captured, but didn’t cause the camera to 'activate".
  2. They don’t record locally (to an SD card), only in the cloud. At least with Wyze, if you lose contact with the cloud, you can at least pull the SD card and review footage. Good luck doing that with Ring.
    There is a reason why I have a mix of brands of security cameras, on different networks, and also why my alarm provider is yet another company. Outages can happen to any company, and most of them use AWS, who was really the root of the issue with the Wyze outage, and not Wyze themselves.
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ring is different class similiar to blink.
blink misled customers about external storage for years, but few ago they allowed flash drive to store motion clips, but you had to purchase new system for ~150-200.
other problem you cannot mix blink systems from different countries.
i think wyze still beats them because has much better lenses