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Forums > User Community Forums > Training and Learning Professionals
Subject: Burned by WebEx outage today
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jason.high
Posts:7
07/10/2007 8:35 PM Alert 

Today there was a WebEx system failure that occurred some time around noon Pacific time - when I had a training session scheduled for several customers.  I tried calling WebEx tech support, but after navigating the phone menu and selecting the option about having trouble hosting a meeting, I was hung up on repeatedly. So I had to humbly tell my customers that I would have to cancel the training session due to technical problems.  About 45 minutes later I finally got through to a WebEx support agent who acknowledged the problem, and about 75 minutes after that I got a call back from the tech support rep. telling me the problem had been solved (though there was no explanation as to why it happened and - more importantly - why it won't happen again).  By then, of course, it was too late. 

Needless to say, I was not happy about this.  It makes me and my company look bad to my customers, and it weakens my trust in WebEx as a reliable tool.

I am wondering - what do others do when WebEx fails?  What other tools do you fall back on?  I have heard of a few free web-based meeting tools like www.vyew.com, www.dimdim.com, and some others.  But I have not used them myself.  If anyone else reading this has used these tools, I would be curious to learn more about your experiences with them.

JH
troys
Posts:2
07/12/2007 5:01 PM Alert 
Thank you for your post on 7/11 Jason. WebEx sincerely apologizes to you and all of our customers who were impacted by this service interruption. Failures of this magnitude are rare, but when one occurs of this size, it does impact call volumes to our support center. Although the overall up-time of our network is 99.9+%, WebEx does not take interruptions like this lightly.

The root as to why it happened rested with an unexpected broken water main that flooded one of our data centers. As traffic was being re-routed, the problem occurred. A full post mortem has been completed and corrective steps taken to ensure a repeat problem will not occur. We would like to have your faith in the reliability of our service strengthened, and the army of WebEx employees who constantly manage and monitor our network and services are committed to this.

Thanks again,

Troy Strahl
VP, Customer Operations
WebEx
jason.high
Posts:7
07/12/2007 5:56 PM Alert 
Thanks for following up, Troy. I appreciate the information. I was not in the best mood when I posted this yesterday (as I a am sure you could tell). I know outages are unavoidable at times. I used to manage a tech support call center and it goes with the territory. But I still think being hung up on when calling for support is not acceptable. It makes me wonder if some overwhelmed tech rep. was just clearing the lines by hanging up. At the very least a message saying all circuits are busy due is in order.

Anyway, thanks for letting me know what happened.

JH
troys
Posts:2
07/18/2007 4:13 PM Alert 

Fully agree Jason.   Thanks again,

-Troy.
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