Amazon attributes the widespread Ring doorbell fright to a system error rather than hackers

Claims that Amazon’s Ring doorbells were compromised on May 28th went widespread on social media this week after the discovery of unusual login activity in TikTok and Reddit posts. People posted screenshots of illegal device logins, all of which strangely had the same date on them. Soon after, many Ring owners began to worry about whether their security had been hacked.

The hype seemed overblown at first, according to cybersecurity expert Davey Winder, who stated, “If someone claimed their doorbell had been hacked, you’d be looking for evidence of tinfoil hat wear.” However, the sheer number of reliable stories drew his attention. “The evidence, however, was the one thing that prompted me to investigate further,” Winder said, referring to the screenshots that matched those taken by several people.

Similar login data were discovered by Winder after examining his own Ring account.

“Look, there were numerous logins from the same devices, all dated May 28th. Indeed, there was a problem,” he added. He did identify all the devices, though, and pointed out that several were no longer in use. That insight convinced him that the problem was a technical glitch rather than a cyberattack.

Since then, Amazon has verified that notion. Ring’s team clarified in a statement on July 18th, “We are aware of an issue where information is displaying inaccurately in Control Center.” This is what a backend update produced. We have no grounds to suspect that this is the consequence of client accounts being accessed without authorization.

As a result, although it appeared to be a mass hack, it was actually a system upgrade that generated confusion rather than a security breach.