Smart camera company Wyze said that a glitch with its network last week allowed some users to see footage from security cameras that belonged to other users.
Wyze said in a post that it experienced an outage on Friday with its AWS cloud service that took down Wyze cameras for several hours.
Because the company worked to restore camera feeds, a security issue emerged wherein certain users were able to see thumbnails and video from cameras that weren’t theirs.
“Some users reported seeing the incorrect thumbnails and Event Videos of their Events tab,” Wyze said.
“We immediately removed access to the Events tab and commenced an investigation.”
“We will now confirm that as cameras were coming back online, about 13,000 Wyze users received thumbnails from cameras that weren’t their very 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,” the company said.
Wyze blamed the incident on a recently integrated third-party caching client library that “received unprecedented load conditions brought on by devices coming back online all of sudden.
Because of this of increased demand, it mixed up device ID and user ID mapping and connected some data to incorrect accounts.”
It added that to prevent an identical issue from occurring again, the company added a latest layer of verification before users are connected to Event Videos, and can also be bypassing caching for checks on user-device relationships until it identifies client libraries which can be “thoroughly stress tested for extreme events like we experienced on Friday.”
“We all know that this may be very disappointing news,” Wyze wrote.
“It doesn’t reflect our commitment to protect customers or mirror the opposite investments and actions now we have taken in recent times to make security a top priority at Wyze.”
Wyze said that every one affected users have been notified and that it sent out notices to different groups of users based on whether their video was shown to other users and whether it was tapped on and viewed.
The company also said that it notified all its users concerning the incident and that “99.75% of all Wyze accounts weren’t affected by the safety event.”
Wyze didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.