Information Technology Services

Webex E2E Encrypted Outage

Outage category: Webex

Location: All Campuses

Status: Open

Resolved Alert:

Initial Symptoms

Enterprise Collaboration was notified on Monday, June 29th. Mason clients began experiencing the following behavior Friday, June 26th, but notification to the service owner (Enterprise Collaboration) was delayed. This was a global problem, affecting all Webex sites, not only Mason: Hosts were able to join End-to-End (E2E) encrypted meetings after a considerable delay. The guests of the meetings would be unable to completely join the meeting as the audio would begin hanging at “Connecting”.

Root Cause Analysis

Cause

On further analysis by Cisco Webex, they found that the issue is occurring due to a known issue (bug) on their collaboration bridge servers. Cisco bug ID CSCvu85326.

Resolution

Testing on Mason’s beta website proved successful and the update was pushed globally to all Webex sites over the course of several hours.

Prevention

Cisco Webex will continue to use update channels that push patches and new releases to select customers. To prevent this type of failure, they will increase the diversity of the pool of early adopters utilized for testing and resolve known issues before it manifests in the production update channel.