Last September, a bug briefly allowed some Wyze camera owners to see into other users' homes. Last week, the issue happened again — and it involved a good amount of subscribers.
On Friday morning, Wyze cameras went down for several hours due to an AWS outage. When they came back online, some people were shown the wrong thumbnails and videos in their Events tab.
In an email to users, Wyze not only confirmed the event, but indicated that 13,000 Wyze users received thumbnails from cameras that weren’t their own and 1,504 users tapped on them.
“Most taps enlarged the thumbnail, but in some cases an Event Video was able to be viewed,” according to Wyze.
Wyze has notified all users, whether or not they were impacted. While that 13,000 number seems large, the company notes that 99.75% of all Wyze accounts were not affected.
In the email, the company says the incident was caused by a third-party caching client library that it recently integrated into its 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 company said.
To prevent the issue from happening again, Wyze has added a new layer of verification before users are able to connect to Event Videos. The company says it has also modified its system to bypass caching for checks on user-device relationships until it identifies new client libraries that are thoroughly stress-tested for extreme events.