Camera shows "Offline"
Camera shows “Offline”
A camera’s row shows a red dot and the status Offline on the Cameras page. This page is the index — pick the row that matches your situation and follow the link to the detailed fix.
Symptom
The camera’s row shows a red dot and the status text Offline. Live view for the camera fails immediately with Camera unavailable. The Last seen timestamp is older than a few minutes.
The cloud marks a camera Offline when one of the following happens:
- The cloud sees three consecutive per-camera error reports from the gateway tracker (
cloud/internal/devices/camera_status.go:78). After the third, the camera flips fromerrortooffline. A single error keeps the camera aterror, notoffline. - The gateway that owns the camera loses its WebSocket heartbeat (older than 90 seconds;
cloud/internal/devices/gateway_ws.go), cascading all its cameras to Offline regardless of their per-camera error count. - The camera is in direct-RTSP mode and the cloud’s embedded go2rtc cannot reach it.
Common causes
Use the table below to pick the page that matches your clues.
| Cause | Symptom clues | Go to |
|---|---|---|
| Camera was power-cycled / rebooted | Went offline immediately after a reboot | Camera shows “Offline” after reboot |
| DHCP lease lost / IP changed | Camera visible on network at a new IP | Camera shows a different IP address than before |
| PoE budget exceeded (switch brownout) | Multiple cameras on the same switch dropped together | PoE brownout |
| No link light on switch | Physical-layer: no network presence | No link light on switch port |
| Firmware flash failed / camera bricked | Went offline during / right after a firmware update | Firmware flash failed |
| Cross-VLAN gateway→camera routing broken | Camera online on its own subnet; gateway cannot reach | ONVIF discovery fails across VLANs |
| Gateway process itself offline | Every camera behind one gateway shows Offline at the same time | Gateway shows “Offline” |
| Gateway-to-cloud WebSocket dropped | Gateway status is Online on-site but cloud shows all cameras Offline | Gateway cannot reach cloud |
| Camera credentials rotated on the device | Camera reachable on the network, but gateway logs show ONVIF/RTSP auth failures | Camera stuck in “Pending” (same fix path: re-enter creds) |
How to tell which row applies
Open the Gateways page in the left nav.
- If the gateway’s own row is red: start with Gateway shows “Offline”. Fix the gateway and every camera behind it recovers.
- If the gateway is green but a single camera is red: the issue is camera-specific. Pick the row above that matches the clues.
- If many cameras on the same switch are red at once: start with PoE brownout or No link light on switch port.
Still stuck?
- How the recording pipeline works — background on gateway + camera state
- If none of the rows above match, collect the gateway log and open a support ticket at support.novalien.com.