That Meraki switch that died on me last Thursday changed my whole view on cloud managed gear

We had a Meraki switch in our warehouse just go completely dark during the afternoon shift. Power supply was fine, but the management plane just dropped off and it took the whole VLAN with it. I spent 2 hours on hold with support before they finally confirmed it had a known hardware fault. Has anyone else run into reliability issues with these newer Meraki switches or was this a one off?

2 comments

2 Comments

amygonzalez6d ago

Had a buddy lose an entire afternoon shift in his distribution center when his Meraki switch did the exact same thing. Support told him it was a known batch issue but wouldn't expedite the replacement until he escalated three times.

jordan6537d ago

Yeah the whole "management plane just dropped off" part is what gets me. I've seen this happen on a few Meraki units and it's not just the switch itself that's the problem, it's that you lose all visibility when it happens. With a normal managed switch you'd at least have console access or a local web UI to check logs, but with Meraki you're completely blind until the cloud decides to talk to you again. What nobody talks about is how the entire VLAN goes with it because the switch stops forwarding traffic too, not just the management. So you end up with a brick that still has power but effectively is a paperweight until you pull it and ship it back. That's a nightmare for a warehouse where every minute of downtime costs real money. I'd argue the real issue isn't even the hardware failure, it's the total lack of local fallback when the cloud link breaks.