Cisco CEO: Webex service outage ‘unacceptable’

Cisco Webex users continue to experience intermittent problems today, some 24 hours after a complete outage of the collaboration system started – a situation that prompted company CEO Chuck Robbins to Tweet:

“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.”

According to the company’s website, a major outage began at 0122 GMT on Sept. 25, 2018, and shut down all Webex services, including Calling, Meetings, Control Hub, Hybrid Services, and Team.   

At the time, the company stated: “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 most current posting from Cisco’s Webex team says:

“Core Messaging services are now available with full message and space history being progressively restored. Along with Messaging and space management capabilities, files are available, and avatar updates are functioning.

Message history is available if previously stored on the user’s device, but they are unable to fetch additional message history from our cloud services . The user will see a loading indicator when unavailable message history is requested.

Other known limitations with Messaging includes the ability to flag messages, see user presence, and contact resolution. Some 1:1 spaces are still intermittently experiencing issues.

Device usability and administration is still restoring. Whiteboarding capabilities are available, as is pairing. Most device administration through Control Hub is not yet available, and other services including one button to push and the ability to bind to a space is still being restored.”

Cisco acquired Webex in 2007 for $3.2 billion and has made significant enhancements to the service ever since. Earlier this year Cisco unified its two, separate, collaboration packages – Spark and WebEx – into a single platform that supports a single set of features. Webex Teams combines collaboration features in Cisco Spark and WebEx  such as whiteboarding, persistent messaging, roster, meeting controls, content sharing, and other collaborative services.