Wyze Apologizes for Breach That Gave 13,000 Customers View of Others’ Homes

Wyze, the security camera company based in Seattle, has apologized to customers after a camera breach allowed around 13,000 users to view other people’s homes, according to Business Insider.

In a message to customers on its forum, the firm explained that the problem started shortly after an outage on Friday morning, Feb. 16. If customers tried to view their cameras during that time, he wrote, images were unavailable.

As cameras were reconnected, users began seeing images and videos in their Events feed that didn’t belong to their own cameras. The company said that the system became overwhelmed when all devices attempted to reconnect at the same time. This surge in usage led to the misallocation of device IDs, which led to certain accounts being linked to the wrong cameras.

In response to this problem, Wyze blamed “a third-party caching client library that was recently integrated into our system.”

Also included in its message, the company said, “We can now confirm that as cameras were coming back online, about 13,000 Wyze users received thumbnails from cameras that were not 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. All affected users have been notified.”

Wyze said that over 99.75% of its accounts were not impacted by this issue, but it apologized and informed all customers.

This isn’t the first time Wyze has been at the center of a breach. In 2019, another breach took place within Wyze which leaked personal information such as usernames, emails, Wi-Fi details, and health information of 2.4 million of its customers on the internet for 23 days. The issue was spotted by cybersecurity firm Twelve Security and was covered by The New York Times.

In September 2023, The Verge reported that certain Wyze customers could access cameras belonging to others. At the same time, Wirecutter, the review section of The New York Times, took down its recommendation for the product.

At the time, the NYT said that it believed Wyze was acting “irresponsibly to its customers” by not informing them after the breach.