Belkin WEMO Users Complain About An Outage Which Has Been Going On For At Least Two Days…. But There Is A Fix
If Belkin didn’t have enough issues when it comes to blowback related to the termination of the back end services of their WEMO NetCams, they have something new to deal with that is upsetting customers. Users of Belkin WeMo smart home products such as their smart plugs have been complaining about an outage that started a couple of days ago which leaves them unable to control their smart home gear. The issue was brought to my attention by a reader of this blog who tried reaching out to Belkin for help, but apparently whatever help she received was anything but helpful. Since I had a couple of pieces of WEMO gear lying around, specifically a pair of smart plugs, I pulled them out to test this. The were able to connect to my home WiFi network just fine. But when I tried to control them from the WEMO app on my iPhone, I got this:
And I appear not to be the only one who has this issue. And some of these people are not happy:
These people have a point. If you look at the troubleshooting that Belkin’s @WEMOCares Twitter account is doing, it’s not effective and amounts to “have you turned it off and on?” Here’s an example from today:
Take it from me, doing either of those things won’t make a difference. And I don’t understand why this is being suggested as a course of action because what appears to actually make a difference is the creation of a WEMO account to control whatever smart home gear that you have from the company. A tweet from @WEMOCares highlights this:
Some history for you. In the last couple of weeks, Belkin pushed out a new version of their WEMO app that gave you the ability to create a WEMO account to “secure” your smart home devices. The creation of an account at the time that the app was pushed out was something that was optional. But it now appears to be a requirement as clearly Belkin did something on their back end to make it a requirement in the last few days. That’s pretty poor communication on the part of Belkin as in the above case, the customer told @WEMOCares what the solution was rather than the other way around. Which is not how the universe should work. And that lack of communication means that customers not only suffer for no reason, but it leaves them with a pretty bad impression of Belkin and their smart home gear.
So if you have this issue, I would recommend creating a WEMO account via the WEMO app to see if that fixes this issue. Chances are that it will as it resolved this issue for me when I tested this on behalf of the person who reached out to me. And it worked for the person in question when they tried it. Though having this advice come from a third party like me rather than Belkin itself really reflects poorly on Belkin. And Belkin may wish to do something about that because this is the sort of thing that won’t help them to sell smart home gear or much of anything else that they make.
September 22, 2020 at 7:29 pm
I’ve been having this problem with the Belkin Wemo cloud too. Well, I finally figured out how to get my new Wemo devices to connect [NOTE: I have an Android phone….may/may not work with iPhone…just try it and see]
– put the new Wemo device onto pairing mode (blinking 2 colors)
– turn on Airplane mode
– go into Settings and manually select WiFi and immediately select the new Wemo device’s network
– go back to the Wemo app
– you should see a black and white pop up screen that says “Do you still want to connect?”
– watch for the devuce to be added
– go back when this is done and turn off Airplane mode
GOOD LUCK!!