That is interesting. There could be various explanations, but can you clarify what the “period of time” is on average? Are you talking minutes, hours, days, etc? There’s also a chance that there are a few different causes for different people.
The thing I find very telling is that a lot of people using xb7’s (and some xb8’s) are having this problem, and for a lot of them, as soon as they either turn off the security or switch to bridge mode to use a different router, then many of them report that their cameras work normally again. This is a very strong indication of interference somewhere at the local level. Add to that the fact that Wyze has struggled to reproduce it.
My primary hypothesis is that it is related to their custom security feature in some way, but it very well could be something else with gateway. I do not have access to the logs sent to Wyze, nor do I have access to someone with that gateway model to log in to the admin tool and view the local logs (firewall logs, system logs, event logs). I’m hoping someone at Wyze will get ahold of such gateways, reproduce the issue to match the logs on their end and be able to get into the admin tool on the gateways or other hardware to see what’s happening on their end.
I forwarded on some of the above reports to see if this can help them reproduce the issue and match it up with all the logs they’ve received and depending on what it is, maybe they can find some kind of resolution, workaround, etc. Hopefully they CAN actually do something about it. Since it has already been accepted as a high impact issue in Fix-it-Friday, we’ll definitely get a public report on this at some point.
I absolutely hope I am wrong, but from what I am reading on other sites with people who have reproduced AND fixed the issue, my primary GUESS is that the issue is perpetrated locally on modem/router/gateway/DNS, etc. As others found in some of the above links, it appears to be related to blocking the connection to TUTK. Without access to an XT7, and similar hardware to login to myself, my hypothesis is that some security systems or block lists added TUTK to their security blocks back when the recent TUTK CVE’s were released, demonstrating a potential vulnerability concern. In order to protect their users, some of those services that advertise as protecting and preventing against remote access to IoT devices likely added TUTK to their block list. TUTK has since updated their code and released a patch for the now known CVEs, but the timeline of when lots of people started reporting this connection issue lines up almost perfectly with the release of the TUTK CVE concerns.
I hope I am wrong, because if that turns out to be the case, I would not be shocked if Wyze tells people there is little they can do on their end except for complain to their ISP that their security is blocking their remote access to their Wyze cameras, and hope the ISP processes and update to remove TUTK from their ban list since TUTK has posted a patch for the known CVEs.
But again, without me personally logging in to a friend’s XT7 or similar router having that problem to read the local logs myself, I can only hypothesize based on the multiple reports of users who were having the problem and then fixed it. Overwhelming evidence points to the issue being local in one way or another, otherwise those people shouldn’t have been able to resolve it themselves simply by swapping the router or turning off the xFi security blockers.
Still, I am interested in your experience of what you mean by it will work for a period of time. How long?
It is also possible that your issue is separate from that of some other users, depending on the details. For now, I would mostly wait to see what Wyze discovers and publicly discloses to us through the Fix-it-Friday Reports, and then decide what to do from there. By no means do I disagree that the action may be for some people to switch to another company if there is no way to undo the blocking short of getting a different modem/router/gateway. When I had Xfinity, I had so many connection issues with their default equipment that I bought my own stuff online and that resolved a lot of issues I had with them, but that’s not a realistic solution for many people. First we’ll see what Wyze learns and if they can try to do something about it.