UniFi Protect is Ubiquiti’s own brand CCTV camera system, all cameras are powered by PoE and require a local on premise NVR, either it be the Cloud Key Gen2+, the UDM Pro or the new UNVR. However, when you want to view the live cameras, the recordings remotely it doesnt work the same way as something from Nest would work, with Nest the recordings are remote and stored in the cloud by Google. With Ubiquiti, it requires no port forwarding which is good for security but to initiate the connection it relies on the cloud to provide a broker between you when you are remote and the NVR device back at home.

Today at 15:53 UTC, that cloud ‘man in the middle’ service went down and has been down since, which is about six hours now. The other issue is, when you are at home and using the app, the app still needs to talk to the cloud, just initially before connecting you to your NVR. The only way users can get access at the moment, is to be on the same LAN network using a desktop browser to the NVR IP address.

So far, Ubiquiti has said there are issues with its API service and they are looking into it, for up to date info see https://status.ui.com

Update – As of 2am on the 26th August the service restored, Ubiquiti has also issued a statement to address the issue:

Our cloud infrastructure handles authentication for UniFi Protect remote access. Due to unusually high load on this service, remote access functionality became unstable and eventually went down. We were able to resolve the customer-facing issues by provisioning a new fleet of servers to handle the increased load.

Ubiquiti