Wyze confirmed a glitch on Monday that allowed some of their customers to peek into other people’s cameras.
One woman from South Bend, Indiana was so alarmed at what she saw in her Wyze camera on Friday morning that she looked up where WYZE’s office is and reached out to KIRO 7 to dig deeper into the situation.
Around 7:30 a.m. EST Friday, Chelsey Allen noticed two cameras at her home were offline. She has five Wyze cameras around her South Bend home pointing towards the street.
When they came back, she could see footage of a woman walking from room to room inside another home in another time zone.
“If I got to see just a regular lady walking around what was somebody else seeing so that was also the disgust right there,” said Allen.
Disgusted and outraged is how Allen says she felt after she realized she was watching footage from someone else’s Wyze camera.
“It could be thousands of people seeing inside someone else’s home,” said Allen “So, it’s just like who’s seeing what.”
Allen said she tried to get help from Wyze.
“I clicked onto the chat, I put in my name, my address, and a description of why I wanted to chat and it puts you into like a queue I was number 160 of that queue,”
The Wyze website doesn’t have any contact information available publicly, so KIRO 7 crews went to the Kirkland office.
Once inside, the room was nearly empty with the crews having this brief exchange after calling for anyone for about five minutes.
“No one’s here I can talk to,” asked KIRO 7 reporter Brittany Toolis.
The WYZE employee answered, “No.”
Toolis replied, “No one at all?”
“I don’t know anything,” said the Wyze employee.
Toolis asked, “You don’t know about the camera issues that’s been happening with the company today?”
“I’m not working on that, said the employee.
Toolis followed up with, “Are the people with the voices I can hear, can they help me?”
No one in the Wyze office said they could help.
Their website shows this timeline of events:
6:31 a.m. PST- Wyze posts on the website they’re experiencing disruptions
7:24 a.m. PST - Wyze says an AWS partner has impacted the device connection and caused login difficulties
8:57 a.m. PST - Wyze is continuing to work on the outage
10:07 a.m. PST - Wyze says devices are starting to recover. Still investigating an issue with the events tab
10:46 a.m. PST - Wyze says metrics show continued improvement.
11:28 a.m. PST - Wyze says metrics show continued improvement for device connection recovery. It told customers to reboot/power cycling devices. It also disabled the events tab in the Wyze app to investigate the security issue.
Allen said Friday’s breach is why she’ll never put a Wyze camera inside her home, “If that security breach happened today when she happened to read me her social security number there’s a possibility that that sound with her number is floating into somebody else’s account.”
On Monday, Wyze sent an email to their customers, detailing Friday’s outage. The email said only .25% of customers experienced the “security event,” that they described as “Some users reported seeing the wrong thumbnails and Event Videos in their Events tab.”
According to Wyze, 13,000 customers saw thumbnails from cameras that were not their own and 1,504 customers opened the thumbnails, playing the video associated with it.
“All affected users have been notified,” the Wyze email said.
According to Wyze, “The incident was caused by a third-party caching client library that was recently integrated into our system. This client library received unprecedented load conditions caused by devices coming back online all at once. As a result of increased demand, it mixed up device ID and user ID mapping and connected some data to incorrect accounts.”
The email concluded, “We must do more and be better, and we will. We are so sorry for this incident and are dedicated to rebuilding your trust.”
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