Teams creates new meeting links with old IDs

[vikankare]

Hi!

One of our customers is facing on interesting problem with Teams meetings. We have tried through different Microsoft support channels but support is not able to escalate the problem because we cannot reproduce the problem intentionally and they reply that without them or us reproducing the problem and using problem steps recorder to record it there is no way of escalating the problem because at their understanding the problem must be “at client side”.  

The problem 

Customer has been using Teams almost from the beginning. At the end of last year they started seeing that on the new meeting invitations (created through Outlook) there is sometimes old meeting invitation ID in the link. This happens to at least three of the users and it is totally random.

Customer has identified that there is no copy & paste magic or anything else going on. All the invitations are created through Outlook and Teams meeting information is added by clicking the Teams meeting button. Users who have had this problem are also advanced so they are well trained and familiar with creating meeting invitations.

When we look at the old meeting from the Teams it says that the meeting was renamed when the new invitation with reused link was created. This means that the totally new people will be able to see the old conversations from the past meetings that were with totally different people with totally different agenda.

We have gotten the original invites from the customer and can see that the only thing linking those meetings together is the same meeting ID (the link).

Customer was already in a situation where confidential data (under the GDPR) was released to people from outside because of the old chat were available in a new meeting. They have hard time trusting the Teams meetings at this point and it doesn’t help that Microsoft is not willing to investigate any further.

Any ideas why or how this could happen?

[#2]

@vikankareWe have just discovered this issue too, one user, who has had it happen 4 times. but only those four times.

we ended up going through all his meetings since the issue started and copying out all the meeting links so we could check which ones were the same and which ones weren't.

it did seem to be with meetings that got renamed or had the content updated, but was totally random as to which link was highjacked! would love to know of anyone else with this experience and if anyone has gotten to the bottom of it. 

we use Teams in a large healthcare provider so confidentiality breaches are not OK.

[#3]

@Elle-Es I would definitely contact Microsoft support regarding this.

[#4]

@Par Linderoth @Elle-Es 

We have been in contact with MS support with no solution yet. It has been a rocky road because this is happening (still) randomly to the customer and because it is totally random there is no Problem Steps Recording available. And because that cannot be delivered the support cannot investigate. 

I have reopened the ticket again because now the customer might have been able to capture all the logs :) But still waiting for information on this one. 

[#5]

@vikankare, at our organisation we also face this issue. We started using MS Teams last March (using Islands mode) and users have been reporting the same issue since. In every case the Teams meeting was created in Outlook365. As it only occurs sometimes it is difficult to reproduce. We have reported the issue to Microsoft and we also got the instruction to record the issue with the Steps Recorder. So far we have not been able to record the issue when it happened. Due date of providing evidence of this issue to Microsoft is set to July 2. 

Have you or anyone else been able to record this issue with the steps recorder?

[#6]

@vikankare, @Elle-Es, we found out a file which contains the next meeting id is stored for each user in C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Teams\meeting-addin\Cache. 

When you create a Teams meeting in Outlook or in Teams this file is renewed and will contain the new Meeting ID. 

Problems with the synchronisation of the user profile probably causes issues with the renewal of this file. This could explain why the same meeting id is used in other meetings. 

We are currently fixing the synchronisation issues in our company, I will post an update if this fixed the issues with the meeting ID for us.

[#7]

@maurice23223that is interesting! I have been providing logs and information to product group through our ticket. I will let them know this too and of course keep this thread updated :) 

They are currently waiting for more information. At least this seems to be finally going forward. 

@maurice23223you are saving user profile to network drive? 

[#8]

@maurice23223 wow that is really interesting. That could definitely be the culprit in our case too the User reporting the issue is know to wander about with a laptop in and out of flakey wifi so profile syncing issues are entirely possibly to blame to lack of refresh in the meeting id

[#9]

We have an open case for this issues as well but it's kinda hard to reproduce on our side. Even deleting the meeting id cache file helps only for one or two days.

[#10]

@vikankare 

I am a colleague of @maurice23223 , we store the User profile on a network share and the profile is roamed to users PC/laptop.

We disabled roaming for the teams data part. Problems are solved now.

It is not so smart (personal opinion) from the developers to store "the next meeting-id" in the cached file.

You can test the behaviour by editing the meeting ID in that cached file, it will re-use a previous meeting if the ID is already known.

[#11]

@Jörg von der Ohe  It probably only works until there is an issue with the roaming profile and users get an old version of the profile (with an already used "next meeting-id").

[#12]

@vikankare We seem to have the same issue. Has Microsoft acknowledged the issue and given a resolution?