What happened

According to Wyze representatives, the cameras’ initial unavailability was due to an issue with Amazon Web Services. When the devices started working again, some users noticed thumbnails of cameras that were not theirs in their apps. Apparently they were showing static images, not full clips. The company told The Verge that more than a dozen users reported the issue, but the actual impact was much larger.

In a series of emails sent to Wyze customers overnight, the company revealed that the issue affected approximately 13,000 customers. So many camera owners were mistakenly sent thumbnails from other accounts and 1,504 people clicked on other users’ thumbnails.

In most cases thumbnails are stated to increase when clicked on them, but “in some cases this may cause the video to be watched”. This has led to some embarrassing situations, including a 23-year-old girl who was getting ready to go to work when the outage occurred.

In an email, Wyze explains that the issue is caused by a “third-party client caching library” that was “recently integrated.” The system was unable to process all cameras that came back immediately after the crash was resolved, resulting in “device ID and user ID confusion.”

Wyze also notes that a new layer of verification has been added before users connect to event videos to “make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

This isn’t the first time Wyze has encountered this issue:

• Last year, a similar issue made it possible to view entire videos from other users’ cameras, not just thumbnails. Then it was related to web caching issue.
• Before that, in 2022, Wyze had confirmed that a security flaw could allow hackers to access all videos stored on the Wyze camera’s SD card. The company knew about the problem for three years but fixed it too late.