Webex Audio and Video Quality degraded

[Kathy N.]

We have over 2,000 staff using Webex to teach classes and in the last couple of days we've noticed a significant increase in complaints about their audio and video quality.  Most of them just upgraded to 40.12.3.11 and are now having issues with increased CPU usage during meetings as well as memory requirements.  Many of them are on devices that are a couple of years old but since this hasn't been an issue for them until this week, I'm hesitant to blame the computer.  Many of them have used the health checker and spark speed test and those come back with no issues.  We have asked them to turn off virtual backgrounds and disable video when possible but as teacher's the video is very important during class time.

Has anyone else noticed an increase from users with these types of complaints?  Any ideas on other ways to troubleshoot these issues?

[shigehirom]

I too have the same problem.  I am the site admin for over 5000 users at school in Hawaii.   Same issues started on 12/3 and we are also on version 40.12.3.11 on the client software.

I've created and escalated a ticket w/ Webex TAC who have not been helpful so far.  They keep saying something about hardware acceleration being off but there are no options on Macs to enable/disable this feature.  It's also happening on PCs as well as IOS devices.

At this point we are just hoping someone at Webex will isolate the issue.  I am planning to site wide disable the virtual backgrounds hoping this will help to reduce some of the issues being experienced.  To recap, we are also seeing users w/ no video available (a yellow triangle appears) or a gray box w/ a spinning wheel appears (like its trying to render the image).   In some situations the Webex session is crashing all together on our teachers laptops.

Lastly, we did discover that our cluster (AW) was upgraded to support 40.12 last Wednesday.  The Hawaii DOE is also on the same cluster as us (the DC also went through an extended upgrade this past weekend).  If you want to validate what cluster you are on just ping your domain: ie. ping hidoe.webex.com

The letters that follow nebula (in this case "aw") is the cluster you are on.  Than check out status.webex.com for information regarding when your node was upgraded.

[dcoope]

I just did the ping.  We're on AW as well.

Located in Minnesota

[Shawna P.]

Hawaii is still having problems.  It's spread across multiple schools here too. 

[shigehirom]

I've been on the phone escalating further this evening.  Have you created a ticket?  If so, could you provide the number?

[dcoope]

Ticket 690425864

[Kathy N.]

The number of complaints we were getting has almost disappeared.  Not sure what the problem was since it was so widespread with users across different schools in our District and remote workers.  

[pscanlan29]

Hi Kathy,

Did the problems you were experiencing just go away all of a sudden or did you work with TAC on a settings change for your environment? Is your Webex instance in the AW cluster as well?

Users in our space we’re still experiencing these issues yesterday, and we’re expecting it to continue today based on how things have been going since 12/3. 

[Kathy N.]

We did not open a a TAC case for this and problems seemed to have decreased significantly.  We are on the AW cluster as well.  Mentioned this to our Webex CSR, Ron Stroh, in a meeting yesterday afternoon and he indicated he was aware of the issue and took our information to add to his list of customers that have the issue.\

Let me know if you need anything else.

Thank you.

[Shawna P.]

Hey Kathy!

In Hawaii we've been having this problem too.  At first I thought it was a network connection issue, but I've been going back and forth with the network guys and they're saying that our connection is strong.  I have a few teachers hardwired into the network now to see if that helps.  Our teachers have been complaining about sounding "robotic" or that their audio is lagged that it comes out rushed to the participants.  Please let me know of anything that you've heard of as remedies because we're desperate over here too. 

Thanks!

[dcoope]

Good Morning,

Our district also had this problem starting on the 3rd.  It's still happening today.  Lots of unhappy teachers!

My chat with support on Friday was basically "I see some latency in their meeting logs.  It could be their/your network."  Unacceptable.

[shigehirom]

Could you provide your ticket number, I want to provide this to TAC.

[dcoope]

690425864

[dcoope]

I should add - this is happening on multiple devices, app version numbers and networks.  Hoping this is something on Cisco's back-end.  Status page has been showing green since Thursday though....