Amcrest Smart Home "Server" down?

[Dan87]

Wow, glad I found this thread. I have been trying to troubleshoot my doorbell that has been showing offline since Friday AM. As someone who works in IT, I find this type of downtime to be completely unacceptable for something that is being sold as a SECURITY product. Not having something like this function for nearly 4 days is not OK. Do you think competitors like RING would allow that to happen? Not likely. I also agree with the others that the doorbell camera should be visible through the Amcrest View Pro app too on mobile devices. I can view my doorbell currently while I am at home and streaming it via PC, but I can't view it when I'm not home. Not at all useful when the server goes down at Amcrest... Hopefully they build in some additional failover systems & redundancy so the end-user does not have to have the massive inconvenience of when this goes down.

[tgfarrell]

Interesting, I don't think my doorbell was ever down this weekend. I wonder what areas everyone is in? Maybe
it was an regional thing? I'm in Charlotte, NC USA.

[amcrest168]

hi @tgfarrell , i don't think our doorbells actually went down. it's just the smart home server is down.

are you saying your smart home app is showing the doorbell as online? you're able to click on the doorbell thumbnail and you can do a live view from the smart home app? that would be interesting if smart home app works for some while the server is down.

[skooby]

Mine is still down, anyone else working?

[tgfarrell]

Works for me just fine but my Android app is at 3.3.6. I can't see my sd card videos since the firmware update.

I wonder if it breaks if I go to 3.5?

Do they do ANY real release testing? Jeesh, I've work in software for 40+ years and doing embedded stuff for the last 20. They need a crash course in software dev processes I think.

[Dan87]

I am in MI. Still down as of this post. Doorbell shows offline in the app, but I can stream video via PC app. I got a firmware update a couple days before this outage too and found it odd I would get promoted constantly to install the new firmware even after I had already updated it. I am on Android version 3.5 for the app.

[tgfarrell]

Anyone still running Android 3.3.6?

[GaryOkie]

Everything has been working fine for me (firmware x509, SH app 3.5.0). I never saw the "server offline" message this past weekend, but then, I don't use the app all that much unless answering the door or pulling up a recorded SD-Card event - which still works fine at this time. All my notifications and live viewing is done via Home Assistant (and Tasker).

I wouldn't be surprised if the firmware update needs the 3.5.0 app update to fully function. Who knows? I also concur that I no longer get the firmware update prompt a few days ago. I assume they updated the version text on the back-end to match the app to fix this.

EDIT: Should add that I am central US-based, so maybe those with server offline issues are hitting another cloud server elsewhere and their fail-over (ha, if any) doesn't work?

[skooby]

I just tried 3.3.6 and still not workin

[amcrest168]

i'm on smart home 3.5.0, firmware v1.000.00AC004.0.R.200509 and doorbell is showing offline even when it's online and recording fine in nvr. however i'm able to pull up the doorbell's device information from the smart home app. i think amcrest should proactively put out a service outage advisory instead of relying on forum members to figure things out.