Wyze Bulb White V1 EOL? Killed? Forced offline?

Power & Lighting
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So how many users have had their Wyze Bulb White V1 stop working and no help from support? I have 12 Bulbs that stopped working about a month ago and Wyze has said it is a firmware issue in email but refused to do anything about it. This is very frustrating. I had 3 bulbs new in box that will not pair in the app either and no support from them either.

I saw in older post user stating this is how they EOL products to stop support on them. If this is true this will change my out look on the company. wanted to hear how many other users have this problem.

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Hey @rbjnelson

I wouldnā€™t spend too much time on it. Hereā€™s the last formal non-response we got:

And hereā€™s a painful list of inquiries:

https://forums.wyze.com/search?q=bulb%202019%20can%27t%20add%20order%3Alatest

And the peculiar bulb nomenclature, fwiw:

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Thereā€™s also ā€œBulb Color (2023 Version)ā€ according to the Release Notes & Firmware page. When I had an original Bulb Color flake on me, Wyze replaced it with the newer version.

Welcome to the Forum, @rbjnelson! :wave:

How old are your Bulbs? If yourā€¦

ā€¦are less than 3 years old, then I wonder if those are covered by the warranty and eligible for replacement with something that will actually work for you. If youā€™ve already talked to Support about the problem, then Iā€™d be sure to mention that and see if itā€™s a possibility.

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I think I should stop ā€˜helpingā€™ until Iā€™m paying closer attention. :slight_smile:

skein_nobg

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I confirm I just had a bulb v1 lose connectivity last week. Actually, it was weird because the app technically said that it was online and didnā€™t show the cloud icon with the line through it to say that it was offline, but it wouldnā€™t respond to any commands to change its status or settings in any way. It acted as if it was totally offline but the app showed it as available. It also wouldnā€™t respond to any API calls.

I tried everything I could think of to being it back online. I killed power to it, I flashed it back to factory settings, I tried going through setup again.

That was actually a lot more difficult than I expected. I was able to connect to the bulb through my Wi-Fi, but it kept failing to set up. Finally, I tried something tricky, turning off my mobile data while it paired to the bulb, and then it gave me an error that it had no internet to connect to the wyze servers, so then I turned my mobile data back on, and then it finished setting up the bulb successfully, or so it said. But Now it actually showed that it was definitely in an offline status. It was grayed out and couldnā€™t be selected and showed the little cloud icon with a line through it.

But I know it was working because it allowed me to connect to it and go through setup and said setup was successful. So it obviously can connect to the wyze servers and can presumably work in a lot of ways. All my other bulb v1s are still functioning normally. I donā€™t know why this one suddenly stopped being responsive. I just removed it for now and figure all check up on it later.

I should have tried to go through setup with the app v 2.5 that I have installed on my phone, but I didnā€™t think about that at the time. I will have to get around to trying that. All I know for sure is that with a little special techno witchery I was able to connect to it and complete setup successfully only to have it show an offline status and refuse to connect to the cloud. I feel fairly confident that this is an issue with the Wyze servers because it would have allowed me to complete setup.

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Easy for you to say. :grin:

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Indeed. Now, if the bulb had completely refused to connect or set up or respond in any way at all, I would just assume that it finally burned out and died. However, the Overall, the fact that it did connect and was responsive and confirmed that it set up successfully, tells me that most of it was working fine. TThe Wi-Fi module is okay, the CPU is working., and it is connecting to my network, and it did connect to the wyze server. So all of these things lead me to believe that the issue may not be in the device itself specifically. Donā€™t get me wrong, I know that the chip they are using in the bulb V1 and plug V1 devices is a very finicky chip. It was a very common iot chip used with a lot of other companies and it has a lot of problems with certain routers, especially any that that are based on wrt in some way. I learned this early on. The chip also has some struggles. Sometimes mobile data is allowed on the phone. At the same time you connect directly to the Wi-Fi chip on the iot device. This is why I knew to disable my mobile data when I was having problems with it. I had previously studied about how this chip has an issue with that for some reason. So yeah, donā€™t get me wrong. I know the bold v one and plug V1 chips are kind of messed up and very picky. But, considering I have a whole ton working fine on my network and have had them all working fine for over 5 years, Iā€™m pretty sure thatā€™s not the issue here in my particular case. My main question is why it only happened to one bulb and not the others? Possible it has something to do with it being part of a different batch or something. Or who knows what else. I just know that ultimately it was responsive and I was able to demonstrate that the Wi-Fi module and the rest of the motherboard seem to be functioning. I can also get the light to turn on and flash and everything in pairing mode. So for the most part it seems to be working and seems to be able to connect but doesnā€™t seem to be able to stay online with a solid connection to their server. Having a bunch of other people indicate similar issues recently indicates that this is not an isolated incident. Though it is strange that for most people itā€™s all of their bulbs went offline, and for me itā€™s only one bulb that went offline. But that may be because I didnā€™t purchase all of my bulbs all at once, and many other people did. So, it may be that only my bulb that was purchased from a particular batch is having the problems and the other ones from a different batch are not. At least thatā€™s my running hypothesis. I bet we could probably narrow that down a little bit if we compared the first six to eight digits of Mac addresses to what is functioning and what is not.

Sometime soon I think Iā€™ll try to repeat setup with the 2.5 app and see if that makes a difference. Then I may create a login. Let somebody at Wyze know.

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:joy:

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I have got no where with customer service. I see post going back a year on this. Mine only started in July. The last firmware update on them was March 2024. Let me check my unity logs to see if I can see them connected to my APs. I have 5 APs in my house and tried a 2.4 Ghz only as well. 120 for new bulbs but they gave me a $15 credit. Wyze need to back their product better

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Screenshot_20250926_182311_Gmail~2
Screenshot_20250926_182311_Gmail~21080Ɨ2199 196 KB

Got this yesterday

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Throw the v1 bulbs away, if you cannot reconnect to wifi.

There has never been a resolution so just move on to the newer Wyze bulbs or try another vendor.

My Wyze 2023 bulbs work fine but I havenā€™t tried to remove them from wifi. I also bought two color bulbs from Kasa and they work fine as well.

The white bulbs are set on a schedule. I can use voice control on the whites or the colors. No more stress.

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I donā€™t want to drop 150 on new bulbs if this is going to be wyze MO. I have the color bulbs and I have the new and they all work fine. The point is this is a [Mod Edit] way to handle products. I have over 70 wyze products I am not someone with 1 dead bulb. Had 13 bulbs in use and 3 new in box I canā€™t use.

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I donā€™t blame you for continuing to want to use those, and I hope the message you received is a genuine cause for optimism. Since @carverofchoice is experiencing this issue recently and Iā€™m also seeing users report recent issues with Plug v1 connectivity, Iā€™m suspicious that theyā€™ve made another back-end change that has unintentionally hosed some things, similar to what happened with v1 Plugs in the summer of last year. If thatā€™s the case, then I think letting them know about the issue (logs + tickets) and pressing them for remediation seems reasonable.

I have only Bulb Colors (2 versions) from Wyze and not any of the original Bulbs, so I canā€™t replicate this, but Iā€™d certainly be frustrated if I was affected by this situation.

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I have not seen any app update or firmware update as of yet. Going to give it until Monday since they sent it late Thursday. I agree it something on the back end since the last firmware update for these bulbs were March of 2024 so nothing I saw would of caused them to go down. They are not updating in the Wyze app like the API is broken. If i see no change by Tuesday morning I will be emailing them back

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Bummer. Only have 4.

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I have 4 of these 2019 bulbs and I wanted to change a couple of them to a 2.4 only SSID I have. Iā€™m using Ubiquiti so I have multiple SSIDs on my APs.

Tried to change one and it failed to re-join. I must have spent 2 hours trying various things and playing with various network settings. Went to the web forums, found the advice about the old app version(s), how that made it work for some people.

I grabbed an old Android tablet out of my night stand and installed app version 2.43.5 (313) as per some of the threads Iā€™ve seen about this. After disabing the Google Play Store it stopped giving me errors about installing an unsupported app/apk. After installing, I logged into the old app and tried to set up the bulb again. That didnā€™t work, symptoms were about the same as before. Seems to install but then is uncontrollable.

The weird thing is, the bulb does join the network, but isnā€™t populated in the app. I can ping it all day from a machine that is on the network. Iā€™m pinging the wayward bulb right now.

The only other thing I can think of is that I need to turn off all my country blocks on my Unifi router. But Iā€™ve already created a rule to bypass all the network controls for the MAC address of the bulb. I guess just for experimentation I could turn off all security controls and see what happens.

Iā€™m afraid to touch the other bulb that is working now, but on the wrong SSID. Thereā€™s no guarantee that it will work again if I mess with it. Sighā€¦.

Maybe if I go get some super old router somewhere and plug it in temporarily, I can make it work, and then move it to my nice Ubiquiti setup. Who knows?!?!? 802.11b anyone?

Is there a default login for these bulbs? I mean clearly itā€™s on the network. I could try to control it with something else other than the Wyze app. I have a Hubitat which is a little home automation puck that I use for some things that accept local control.

I have spent SO. MUCH. TIME. futzing with these. I could just buy some new ones that set up with Bluetooth but why reward Wyze for not regression testing these old bulbs with the new app versions? I mean it would only take a few minutes. They donā€™t have such a huge product portfolio that they canā€™t be bothered to regression test.

I just donā€™t want another app, which is why Iā€™m somewhat motivated to make these work.

Anyway.

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@brons2 I am with you 100% I will not buy more of the v2 bulbs if this will happen with the v3 bulbs if they ever come out with them.

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I have complained about Wyze not doing regression testing for a long time. I guess they think theyā€™re saving money that way.

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:point_up: This and @carverofchoiceā€™s description of recently experiencing this problem makes me think of an issue with original Plugs that happened recently:

In that particular case, the number of affected users seemed to grow over several days, and then after a weekend the Plugs were back online and working again, which makes me suspect a server-side change the previous week that was later remediated. While trying to assist with troubleshooting and replicating the issue, I found that a Plug I pulled out of a drawer and plugged into power would appear ā€œOfflineā€ in the Wyze app, but I could ping it over my LAN, and that seems very similar to whatā€™s happening with your original Bulbs.

I know @rbjnelson mentioned in an earlier post that a firmware change for these older Bulbs was forthcoming, but to me this ā€œfeelsā€ very much like a back-end issue and not a device firmware issue. I donā€™t expect Support to solve this. This seems like a problem for the engineers. :man_shrugging:

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