Surface Pro 8 Camera Not Working - yet white light remains on?

Just to give further updates, I am pushing to still use Windows Hello just to see if recent firmware updates fixed anything. The result is still the same, but now I notice there are more blue screen stoppages, and the adaptive brightness also stops working time to time. Seems the steps taken are backwards. Not sure anyone from Microsoft will respond on this thread. It's a shame you pay premium for a device that is actually not that premium.

Chiming in with my own experience with what I suspect is the same bug.

Microsoft Surface Pro 7

Fully updated driver on the Surface camera.

I run into an issue any time I use my Surface's camera in a meeting.

In Google Meet (in Microsoft Edge), the camera will function just fine until some time later (usually after a period of inactivity, like while waiting for the other person and working in a different tab). Eventually, the screen just freezes, though the camera says it is there. Turning off the camera in Google Meet suddenly gets the program to recognize that a problem has occurred, because the screen will go black and Google Meet will now insist that I have no camera. Meanwhile, the camera light continues to be on. Going to the Camera Privacy Settings in Windows, it will show the camera is currently in use by the browser. Force closing the browser from the task manager does not change the Camera Privacy Settings from saying that the browser is using the camera. Trying to change the camera's settings in Windows Camera Settings will never finish loading the page to allow you to affect anything other than disabling it. Disabling it will not turn off the camera light (restart must happen in order for the changes to take effect, it says). Finally, restarting the computer an re-enabling the camera works with the camera functioning as it is intended (until its next real use).

Running a Zoom meeting in the app, the camera functioned just fine for about 37 minutes. Mid-meeting and mid-sharing my screen, the call froze, and the entire app had to be force closed. The light on the camera remained on. I tried to re-initiate the call multiple times in the app, but every time it insisted that I was already in a meeting, and gave me no options. I force closed the app again, finally re-joining in the Zoom in-browser version (Microsoft Edge), where I was told that that camera was in use by a different app. Camera Privacy Settings claims it was in use by the Zoom app, despite the app not being listed on my task manager (having been force closed). Several hours later, the light continues to be on, and the Camera Privacy Settings continue to insist that the camera is being used by the Zoom app. Disabling from the device manager results in exactly the same thing as disabling from the Camera Settings -- prompts you to restart in order for the changes to take effect. The light remains on.

No blue screen here, but the camera failing and getting stuck on (and causing other errors in other programs) seems to be a similar trend. There's something causing this camera to get stuck "on", and the only way to reset it is with a full computer restart.

You folks are not crazy:

I work for Microsoft myself, and I have this problem daily with my Surface 8 Pro. Camera bombs out in the middle of Teams calls all the time and requires reboots to fix. It's so bad I just can't use video on Teams anymore.. I use my iPhone instead. I have a very vanilla Win11 install on this unit. I'm also using Windows Hello (which also breaks at the same time when the camera dies). Sometimes the camera dies with the light stuck on, sometimes with the light off.

I'm not sure what's killing the camera, but I get the following in repeating event in event viewer:

A timeout (30000 milliseconds) was reached while waiting for a transaction response from the FrameServer service.

-- Followed by this event... when it seems to just give up trying:

The following service has repeatedly stopped responding to service control requests: Windows Camera Frame Server

Contact the service vendor or the system administrator about whether to disable this service until the problem is identified.

You may have to restart the computer in safe mode before you can disable the service.

I wish the Surface team would fix this.... @Microsoft people, if you want to chase this with me, please contact me internally.

Well, this is a shame that even Microsoft Employee is having the problem but they can't solve it.

I managed to get them to confirm the issue and get them to understand it's totally not related to our domain or others as other businesses are having the same issue. Some of our users reported that the camera would work in Zoom or Webex meetings but it'd break once they make a Teams meeting.

I also had to turn off Windows Hello for myself. It'd freeze the laptop if I locked it and then come back a few minutes later. I'd have to restart the laptop (I am using a Surface Laptop 4, reported the camera issue would be happening only in Surface Pro models).

Anyway, the person who I was communicating with from Microsoft told me that they confirmed the issue and that soon they'll be rolling out updates to fix the issue, however no ETA.

I honestly don't mind disabling Windows Hello or not using the camera as I don't have meetings with clients etc. But our users must have it and they get frustrated when this happens middle of an important meeting with a client, candidate, etc.

We expect Microsoft to fix this problem in a reasonable time, as they expect business to pay their bills to them on time as well. Let's make an empathy.

To be fair to the surface team, it does appear that they pushed out an update to the camera firmware (at least for my Surface Pro 8), per https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/surface-pro-8-update-history-1080bf34-7e87-408c-8619-80571283526e . Sadly this didn't fix the issue for me.

So it's not like they're not trying at least... Hardware and drivers are hard.