Cisco Webex Team customers were unhappy last week as the platform experienced week long service outages across almost the entire system.
It began Tuesday, September 24th just before 8:30 p.m. EST, with Cisco updating its status website stating, “WebEx Teams services are currently impacted by an ongoing service outage. Engineering resources are online and working to restore services. We apologize for the impact and all hands are on deck to restore Teams, Meetings, Calling, Care and Context services.”
The outages continued though, with most of the services affected by technical issues including, Webex Calling, Control Hub, Hybrid Services, Teams Meetings and Devices, and Context Service.
Cisco Webex customers quickly took to Twitter to voice their frustrations and curiosity over why the platform was experiencing technical difficulties.
Wow. Cisco Webex has been down for almost 24 hours. Something really bad must have gone down.
— Lucky (@aluckydoggo) September 25, 2018
https://twitter.com/NJDavidD/status/1044564964160221184
22 hours outage. Really!? Multiple business meetings affected today across our global business. We have our first Webex Video Meeting with 15 participants in Atlanta, Austin, Copenhagen, Hamburg & Stuttgart at 8am tomorrow. I am not in the mood for a repeat of today. #CiscoWebex
— Klaus Feldam (@klausfeldam) September 26, 2018
A Webex ‘down detector‘, shows that customers around the globe were affected, including the Greater Toronto area, much of the U.S., large parts of Europe and as far as Australia.
Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins took to Twitter on the first day of the outages stating:
The @webex outage today is unacceptable, and we apologize for the disruption caused to you, our customers. Webex Meetings is now functional. Our engineers are working to restore Webex Teams and ensure this doesn’t happen again. Thank you for your patience & trust. @Cisco
— Chuck Robbins (@ChuckRobbins) September 25, 2018
Concerns over possible security breaches were expressed by users online, however the Cisco Collaboration twitter page commented on Twitter saying “there is no current indication of a malicious event, but we are taking appropriate precautions. Thank you for your patience and trust.”
As time went on Cisco continued to update its status, making more than 60 posts as services continued to experience technical issues, problems were identified and then eventually restored.
However Cisco customers continued to express frustration over how long it was taking, even stating that maybe it was time to switch over to other competitor team collaboration platforms such as Microsft Teams, Zoom and even Slack.
Cisco’s collaboration services have been around for many years, it wasn’t until earlier this year that it rebranded all its various collaboration services under one umbrella, Cisco Webex.
Current status
Most of the services for WebEx were finally restored Friday at 12:38 EST, Cisco’s status website stated, “Service restoration efforts have been ongoing, and many of our service deployments have completed. Webex Calling, WebEx Control Hub, WebEx Hybrid Services, Webex Teams Meetings and Devices and Context Service have been fully restored. These are continually monitored and are operating as expected.”
Updates continued through into Monday however with repairs still be made to Hybrid Calendar services, Developer APIs and Care Assistant bot. Though, it’s global systems status website states as of Monday, “All systems are a go and Webex is running smoothly with no issues.”
After almost a week with the entire platform done, it appears that the majority of services have been restored, with still no definite answer as to why these outages happened in the first place. ITBusiness.ca reached out to Cisco Webex, but a spokesperson said that they were unable to add further comment.