Arlo Essential spotlight keeps factory resetting itself.

[essej818]

Ive used my arlo camera for a few months and it worked until 15 days ago when I looked on my app and the camera was not linked to my account anymore. It took me 15 days to get the time to climb my way up there to factory reset it.

It worked again for 2 hours until I got a notification on my phone that my camera received a factory reset signal.

It has been removed from my account again.

What or who is sending my camera a factory reset signal and how can I stop this. Nothing I search online is helpful or remotely relevant. Arlo support is completely useless.

[JamesC]

Many of the cases that have been reported that result in the symptoms being discussed here include damaged or improperly seated charging cables/solar panels. Third-party accessories have also been known to result in the symptoms discussed in this thread. For those experiencing these symptoms after having ruled out a third party accessory or damaged charging cable/solar panel, I encourage you to reach out to Arlo Support to further investigate the issue. You can find Arlo Support contact options within the Arlo Secure mobile app under Settings > Support.

JamesC

[Emily44]

Here's a link re: getting a company to honor their warranty:

https://lifehacker.com/what-to-do-when-a-company-won-t-honor-a-warranty-1850169034

Here's a link to the Arlo warranty:

https://www.arlo.com/en-us/product-warranty.html

Here's a link to the Arlo management team:

https://investor.arlo.com/governance/management-team/default.aspx

Here's a link to the Arlo Board of Directors (whose main function is to look out for the best interest of Arlo shareholders):

https://investor.arlo.com/governance/board-of-directors/default.aspx

Stockholders or interested parties who wish to communicate with the Board may do so by sending written communications addressed to the Secretary of Arlo Technologies, Inc., 3030 Orchard Parkway, San Jose, California 95134. These communications will be reviewed by the Secretary of Arlo who will determine whether the communication is appropriate for presentation to the Board or the relevant director. The purpose of this screening is to allow the Board to avoid having to consider irrelevant or inappropriate communications (such as advertisements, solicitations and hostile communications).

And finally, a link to Arlo's Whistleblower Hotline (I selected "potential non-compliance with legal requirements" as the incident classification):

https://investor.arlo.com/governance/whistleblower-hotline/default.aspx

[ekrueger]

So a quick update after this last post.....

I received an email from Jeff N (Arlo Level 3 support) late on Friday, 7/28, asking for my phone number, as he was aware of the issue I had reported, and wanted to follow up directly.

I'll admit, I was pretty impressed to get a response at all.  I sent him my cell# and told him to call me the beginning of the week (he noted he wasn't in on the weekend).   It's now 8/12, but never received a phone call.....so much for Level 3 Support I guess.....disappointing.

@JamesC

As others noted, these cameras are under warranty.  Arlo hasn't offered to fix the problem or replace defective hardware; let alone acknowledge a problem exists and they're working on it (which is all I originally asked for).  Instead, they just close out the cases.   It's a shame really....up until this point, it's been a great product with a perfect use case; but it's hard to sign up for that when the camera not only goes offline, but it gets ejected from your account and the only recourse is to have to physically touch it. (given the location these get mounted, that's painful).

I figure there's less than a month until my 1 year warranty expires.  When that happens, I plan to file actions with the BBB and others about the actions of intentionally waiting for the warranty to expire.   I'll likely couple that some notes to the Arlo executive staff on LinkedIn; perhaps the Arlo Director of Customer Care Operations and the Sr Director of Customer Care might be interested in understanding how Arlo is failing their customers.

[sabarnes21]

The same thing keeps happening to my Pro4 camera!! How can I fix it?

[sabarnes21]

My Pro4 camera keeps doing the factory reset itself after working fine for 6 months. So frustrating! Is there any way I can fix it?

[Santerianumero1]

I know what you can do to fix it. Light it on fire and mail the ashes back to Arlo.

I love the bull**bleep** response of a faulty seal on a camera that's meant to withstand normal weather outside from JamesC. What a cop out. Something happened with the last firmware and Arlo hasn't figured out how to fix it.  I cancelled my subscription.  Everyone here should do the same. 

Arlo is crooked. 

[ekrueger]

@JamesC

So thought I'd share my latest update.....

Jeff from Level 3 support had been reaching out this week to schedule a meeting to talk.  That meeting happened this morning, when we had agreed on a good time to talk.     In my specific case, I had a single camera reset itself 2x on the same day, and after doing a full reset to it back then, it hasn't occurred again.....somewhere about 4-5 weeks ago.   I say that so people understand I'm not suffering from daily factory resets.   While I am annoyed that it happened, my much larger issue is with how Arlo has handled the situation to date -- which admittedly has been quite poor -- closing cases without providing answers, not hearing from Level 3 support as expected, etc.   To provide some context, I have an extensive corporate IT background, work in the field, and have done everything from Development to Sales to Support; so I admit to understand what development cycles look like, how bug fixes are introduced into the code, how that impacts delivery, and so forth.  My biggest thing wasn't that I needed a fix that day, but just that I wanted it acknowledged as an issue and commitment it was being addressed.  (which hadn't happened)

So today, we spent about 30-45 minutes on the phone discussing the situation.   I believe the conversation, as a whole, was good and useful.  It's clear to me that there seems to be multiple issues across multiple products that exhibit similar behaviors, but are driven from different root causes.   Ultimately what this means is that there is likely not a single fix that makes everyone happy all at once; however, it was clear that they are invested to getting this figured out.  The discussion ranged from what was the user experience of when the failures occurred, to how was the camera reinstated (since I had to do it multiple times), to what has happened since, to what happened with I was engaged with Level 1 support, and so forth.

There was discussions that in one situation, clearly water infiltration played a role in that camera misbehaving.  (not debating whether it should or shouldn't have happened).  There was discussion around a prior firmware might have contributed to failures and how they adjusted the firmwares back and as they did that, the issue seemed to go away for some people.   Then there were discussions on situations like mine, where it doesn't necessarily seem to be related to either one at this point in time. (with what we know right now).  We discussed how they've collected some cameras from the field for FA (failure analysis)......basically asking someone to send in a camera that is reliably failing so that they can probe it to more quickly understand what is happening.   (We do the same thing in my industry as well, if needed, since the goal is to derive a fix asap, and you need to understand the failure to do that).   We discussed my severe displeasure with how Arlo Support has handled my case....where I had open questions and they ignored the questions and closed the ticket.  I expressed how Support didn't seem interested in root cause, but instead, once the camera was online again, they seem to feel that their job was complete. (when in reality it is just beginning).    The final discussion was around what was needed, if such an event happened again, and that I should be able to reach out to Level 3 directly and they'll open whatever case is needed internally to move this forward.

As I mentioned, the one camera (of 5 here) that has exhibited the issue has run fine for a month now with the solar panel attached (and through many rainy days).  Likely at this stage, it'll be hard to triage it effectively given the amount of uptime it's had.  (my opinion).  For me, my biggest issue was the lack of acceptance that there was an issue or any effort to actually assist a customer in resolving it.   I think Jeff did a good job on that front in our discussions.   It definitely doesn't exonerate Arlo of the problem or how it's been handled; but in my situation, it was a very good reach out by him to be open about what they were seeing, what's happening behind the scenes, and what happens if I were to see an issue arise again.   And for that, I definitely appreciate it.

Just wanted to be fair, and share the good with the bad as we go through this.....hopefully it's a positive reset on the relationship for me, and hopefully they'll get to root cause on all the possible issues.

Thanks,

Erick

ps.  FYI - They do read these forums, as Jeff made reference to some of my posts when we talked today.

[catroadman]

 figured it out on mine anyway. The through bolt at the back of the housing is hollow. My camera is mounted high in a tree looking down at garage doors. I had the camera pointed down. Had all the same issues as started above. Pulled the unit apart, ants and water inside. It came in from the opening in the bolt. I am going to let it sit apart for a few days, epoxy the opening closed and try again. Unit is 3 months old. Guess they are not sealed after all

[MG-ATC]

I have 4 Essential Spotlight cameras. 3 work fine, one keeps sensing a factory reset request exactly as everyone has described. I've tried all of the discussed remedies, nothing works. And Arlo support is useless.  I guve up, going with a competitor  

[mrw_e36]

I moved on to Eufy stuff. Got one camera last week and got it mounted and so far it's fantastic. I've got a bunch of options and settings that are readily available and free that were only available to me when I was on Arlo's subscription service.

I do not plan on buying any Arlo equipment in the future, and as my existing Arlo stuff dies off, I will continue to replace with Eufy going forward.

[Arlo911]

I’m having the same issue. It works for 5 mins and reset to factory itself.

[BigJD]

All true and exactly what I was thinking. 

[BigJD]

First of all, they did this same crap to me when I was having a video playback issue. I’m in the CE industry and  I’m also very technical. After 30 minutes on a call with them when they asked me to document and send info on the errors I told them that if they want me to QC their software they can pay me $350 an hour. 

Look - they pushed a firmware update and it bricked some of our cameras. They’ve always had multiple hardware versions in every model going back to the Gen 1, so I’ll bet if we all dug into this we’d find specific hardware versions are effected. All these devices didn’t all get wet in April and stop working. 

I’m switching to another brand as these die. 

It’s a tough business I can tell you for sure. 

But this is a bad way to run it 

[HappySwede]

Mine just started doing exactly the same thing. All by itself. No-one touched it and no-one else has access to the app. There are no accessories attached - it's just the camera. 

[AndreiT]

In my case I think this was caused by the use of an aftermarket battery sourced on Amazon. I noticed my camera only had these issues with the KASA battery installed

[BigJD]

Very interesting. How long did it work with the 3rd party battery?  I wonder if your friends at Arlo made 3rd party accessories not compatible with the last firmware update?

[InkedBaldGuy]

I’ve been getting the issue on 1 of my Essential Spotlight cameras for about a month now. Multiple self resets where tech support wants me to reset it again and watch it for 48 hours. It holds for a few days and resets again. I’m close to the 1 year warranty so they keep giving me the run around. Wish I went with Ring, or any other company. I’ll have AmEx use their warranty on electronics and go after them that way if they want to continue to not honor their warranty and stand by their products. This could have been resolved easily, but now I’m in a vindictive mood and I could care less for any of the cameras I have. They aren’t that great, coming from someone that uses and installs camera systems for a living.

[michalk]

Hey everyone,

I've been facing the exact same issue with my Arlo camera, and it's driving me crazy! Just like some of you, I discovered my camera had mysteriously unlinked from my account. It took me a while to climb up and perform a factory reset, and it worked for a mere 2 hours before I received a notification on my phone about another factory reset signal.

This has happened twice now, and it's beyond frustrating. I've searched online for solutions, but nothing seems to be remotely helpful. Arlo support hasn't been of much use either.
It's gotta be buggy firmware. Shame arlo doesn't want to acknowledge and fix it. Guess we've gotta wait untils someone gets robbed and sues them 😐

[GilGomesJr]

One of my three essential spotlight (version 1) cameras did this today out of the blue.  The camera will no longer connect to my hub.  The camera will not reset.  I would call support, but I can see through previous posts that would be a complete waste of time and effort.  This is OBVIOUSLY a fairly widely experienced issue.  I don't see them jumping through hoops to correct it...

[jguerdat]

It's not obvious at all but does happen, not only with Arlo but with any electronics company.

The only way to get an RMA is to go through official support, whether you want to or not. They are the deciding factor while this forum is a user to user discussion group with 3 Arlo moderators that may be able to help if you get stuck. The rest of us (yes, even the so-called "gurus") are just users and have no way to cause anything to happen. That's what the official support is all about.

[cameragirl1971]

With all due respect, Arlo has NO customer service! I've tried to contact numerous supposed Arlo customer service numbers to no avail. I can't access the login details for my cameras anymore because I switched from apple iPhone to android & was using the icloud email for my cameras. I can't access that so I can't use my cameras now & still being charged by Arlo for months. I have gone as far as trying to contact thr Arlo CEO on LinkedIn with yet still no response! Arlo customer service is AWFUL to put it mildly

[Santerianumero1]

This is why you take action with your wallet and cancel your subscription like I did. I ripped everything arlo down and it went in the garbage. Arlo is a worthless company. Switch to anything else BUT Arlo. 

[Benjie]

I’ve started getting the exact same message and results (camera disappears).  Arlo Pro 3 Spotlight camera.

[Benjie]

Mine started when I installed the solar charger (Arlo brand).  Both are in an exposed environment.  

[codemagic]

I am experiencing the same issue (so far) the factory reset message reliably came back as soon as I plugged in the solar panel charger to the newly-resync’ed floodlight. This last time I left the solar panel disconnected AND I completed the setup process next to my Arlo hub before climbing the ladder to install it to my house. So far the factory reset has not returned (only 1 fay so far)

[jkok]

I have two Essential Spotlight cameras and this issue happens on one camera about once a month. I just finished getting it set up again. I wish they could get this issue resolved.