Cannot see live picture from Arlo Q. Says "Your camera is busy and cannot restart."

[allan_p]

Cannot connect to live video of Arlo Q. Just get the spinning circle and the Connecting... message. When I logged in to the portal and clicked on restart in the cameras settings, I just get "Your camera is busy and cannot restart". What now? I am 1,500 miles away from the camera so I cannot pull the plug.

[Mister_E]

I have the same problem. Right now, while I'm far away from home. This has happened several times to me since I first bought the arlo q a couple of years ago. So it is not a new problem to me, at least.

But for me, this is the last straw. I'll be swapping out Arlo with something else when I get home from vacation, because this unreliability is just.. Mindboggling for a product of this type.

[JessicaP]

Hi allan_p and Mister_E,

Are you having this problem on the web client on your computer as well? If checking through the Arlo app, is this happening on both WiFi and/or cellular data?

[allan_p]

Yes, it happens on web client on pc and app on phone. On the phone, it happens on wifi and cellular. Just cannot connect to the camera any more.

[JessicaP]

I would suggest to contact the Support Team to further investigate this issue. You will find several options for contacting support in the provided link.

[allan_p]

Why bother? One of the things they are going to tell me to do is to unplug and plug it back in. I can't, being 1,500 miles away from it. And considering that there are other threads on this board of a similar nature, I suspect this is a bigger problem than just my device.

I suppose I'll just have to wait until I can get someone to go into my condo and power cycle the device. And then if it still doesn't work, I will contact support.

I just find it strange that it shows connected to the wifi, yet I cannot connect to it. Unless that's just a status in the Arlo servers that is outdated and the device is truly offline. Maybe all the statuses are wrong, and that is why it says the device is busy and I can't reboot it.

[NDTtek]

Personally, I even receive the notifications on my phone that there is movement but no video shows up in my library and cannot go live with the Q. My other non Q camera works just fine.

[allan_p · Accepted solution]

Solved the problem. Had the building super go in, unplug the power then plug it back in. Now it seems to be working.

Why it says it was connected when it probably wasn't is the real issue.

[NDTtek]

You can also go into the web page setting for your Arlo Q and restart it from there. This is what I have just done and it's back to normal. No need to send someone to your place it turns out. 🙂
Note: It is not the turn off function, it is the restart function which you need to scroll to the bottom to find.

[allan_p]

Except, as I said in my first post: When I logged in to the portal and clicked on restart in the cameras settings, I just get "Your camera is busy and cannot restart".

So that didn't work. It needed a complete power cycle to get it working again. Which was difficult because I don't live anywhere near the device.

[NDTtek]

Totally forgot about that as I was trying to figure out a way to fix. The message was meant more towards others having the same issue as we had, not you specifically. 🙂
Just noticed the box on the top right of the reply page which you can untick to not receive emails from replies. I will do that right now so if you reply again (or others) I will not see it. Haha.  Enjoy your now working camera, I guess I got lucky. 🙂