Outage on Dec 7, 2021 revealed huge Ring weaknesses

Products Feature Request Board
, , , ,
#1

Ring services were down for many hours on Dec 7, 2021. The reason provided during the outage was blamed on an Amazon Web Services (AWS) failure. During this time, I could not login and my Ring cameras could not upload videos. I could not connect to my own Ring security base station and couldn’t even view live video from my own cameras while I was at home connected to my own wi-fi network. And of course, if I had an intruder during this time, it would not have been captured on video or uploaded to the Ring network. THIS IS UNSAT!!! The Ring App kept telling me that “Your phone is not connected to the Internet” and “Please connect your iPhone to the Internet”. Not true. I was certainly connected to the Internet, but the Ring network was not. I have lost confidence in Ring’s capability as a legitimate security system. The Ring network is now proven as the weak link in the Ring security system and all of the ‘features’ it provides.
Recommendations:

  1. Focus on keeping Ring services online as a TOP priority over the incessant addition of new features that seem to come out monthly. It doesn’t matter what features we have if the system is down.
  2. Develop (or re-write) the Ring Continuity of Operations Plan (COOP) and assure redundancy in the Ring network; have a failover for not if, but when, AWS goes down, assuming that was the actual problem instead of the more likely cyber-attack.
  3. Develop a feature that allows users to locally store camera videos on their computer, NAS, or DVR.
  4. Provide a way to always be able to access my own cameras and alarm system even if the Ring network is completely down.
  5. Provide a way to access Device Health even if the Ring network is down.
#2

You are asking for a lot of the “cloud” part of the service to be offloaded onto a device that you control. How much would you be willing to pay for such a device? $100? $250? $500? Monthly service fee in addition to what you pay now?
Also, #3 is already available in the 2nd Gen Base Station. I’m not sure about #4 but part of it may be available on the 2nd Gen as well.

#3

All that you state may be true. I am only identifying the problem and possible fixes that Ring may be able to provide, OR NOT. No wonder Ring can provide services so inexpensively by using AWS. Now AWS has failed them. I guess Ring is a decent security system as long as you don’t depend on it to protect anything. It’s like saying my bank hardly loses any money.

1 Like
#4

The cloud is the achilles heel of every SaaS platform out there. I personally would love to have everything on premise but that’s now how the world rolls anymore. I can draw a big conclusion based on the outage, such as Amazon only runs Ring essential services out of US-East-1 and is not distributed across other regions to ensure high availability. Amazon needs to get their crap together and manage this SaaS product like any other enterprise grade service. It needs run out of multiple regional data centers and maybe even consider multiple providers, like Google Cloud.

1 Like
#5

I agree! I want to use my ring cameras and newly purchased alarm system as my families first line of defense, but it needs to be reliable, 24/7.
I am also very disappointed that I can not set Ring cameras to also stream all their video to my local DAS or NAS.

#6

You can store videos locally on the new (3rd gen?) base station with the SD card slot but you have to supply the SD card, not sure if you need a subscription to store videos locally as it seem to suggest on the site. But that still doesn’t address the issue of the Ring service needing to be up in order to view the live feed. Should be able to connect to the cameras directly if you’re on the same wifi network or even remotely without the need for the cloud service. This could also mean being able to use the cameras after they are no longer supported may not be possible and they basically become paper weights.

#7

When I activated my Ring Alarm Pro I immediately got an email with a code for a free 64GB SD card. I would have preferred the option to pay the difference for a 512GB card, I might just use the 64GB SD card from Ring for something else…