8x8 Meetings: users being prompted to join meeting unexpectedly.

Information

8x8 Meetings: users being prompted to join meeting unexpectedly.

Status: closed
Date:
End:
Duration: 4 days 23 hours 25 minutes
Affected Components:
Americas EMEA APAC Meet Meet Meet
Update

8x8 is currently investigating an issue with users being invited to a meeting that seemed to be triggered randomly. 8x8 has mitigated the issue and users will not be able to join the meeting any longer. We suggest that users ignore the meeting invite while we investigate the issue further.

Update

On May 1, 2025, 8x8 began receiving reports of users being invited to a meeting labeled metadatauploader (Official path to the 8x8 meeting being “developmentserver/metadatauploader”). This caused users to be prompted to join the same meeting under that name. 8x8 has since disabled this meeting room. Due to this disabling of the room users will now instead have a system message window pop up. 


Furthermore, it is possible to completely disable 8x8’s deep linking functionality through the “Allow meetings to be launched in desktop app” option in the Meetings section of Settings. Note, however, that disabling this feature will make it impossible for users to cross launch meetings in 8x8 Work from calendars and browsers, so 8x8 only recommends that course of action to users who are actively impacted. This can also be disabled in the 8x8 Admin Console under the meetings section for the entire user base for each customer. 

8x8 is currently investigating the cause of this trigger event. We will continue to provide updates as they become available. We apologize for the interruption.

Update

8x8 is continuing to investigate the cause of the inadvertent meeting invites. Based on our analysis to date, these meeting prompts are initiated by a client-side process that interacts with a feature in the 8x8 Work desktop application. This feature allows the app to respond to meeting requests, but only when triggered locally. We have confirmed that the meeting requests cannot originate from external sources and can only be initiated within a given customer’s local environment. There is no evidence that any 8x8 applications or systems have been compromised. 8x8 will continue its investigation and provide updates as more information becomes available.

Update

Progress has been made, and 8x8 has deployed a mitigation to all 8x8 Work desktop endpoints to prevent unprompted meeting invitations. Please instruct users to quit and then relaunch the 8x8 Work application to receive this update. Logging out and logging back in will not resolve the issue. As previously mentioned, we have confirmed that the meeting requests cannot originate from external sources and can only be initiated by other processes running on the same user device. We will provide the next update on Monday, May 5th, 2025, by the close of business PDT.

Resolved

8x8 Meet allows users to join video meetings via phone, web browser, and the 8x8 Work apps for desktop and mobile. While all methods are supported, we consider joining through the 8x8 Work apps to provide the most reliable and feature-rich experience. For this reason, when possible, we direct users to open meetings in the app automatically—a process commonly known as deep linking.

To enable deep linking, the 8x8 Work app listens for local requests on one of three predefined localhost ports: 59201, 8430, or 43618. These ports are only accessible from other applications running on the same device and are not exposed to any external network. When a user clicks a meeting link in a browser, the resulting meeting page checks whether the 8x8 Work app is running on the device. If it is, the page can request the app to launch and handle the meeting.

Importantly, when the app receives such a request, it will present either a confirmation dialog or a pre-join screen. Unless a user has explicitly disabled the pre-join screen, the app will not join a meeting without being prompted.

Recent Observations:

On May 1, 2025, we began receiving reports of users being prompted to join meetings labeled “metadatauploader.” These prompts were not triggered by the users themselves and appear to originate from automated processes running on their machines.

While we cannot inspect customer environments directly, the cause of the meeting triggers was another local process sending requests to the 8x8 Work localhost port for meeting joining. This behavior will be changed in 8x8 Work in a future release to prevent this from happening in the future.

Actions Taken:

To prevent further disruption, we have disabled the meeting in question.

Additionally, we would like to remind customers that deep linking can be disabled entirely through the “Allow meetings to be launched in desktop app” setting, found in the Meetings section of the 8x8 Work app settings. Disabling this option will prevent the desktop app from being invoked automatically when a meeting link is opened in a browser.

Pending Actions:

To further enhance reliability and eliminate reliance on shared local resources, we are preparing a new version of the 8x8 Work client that will no longer use local ports for actually launching meetings. Instead, it will rely on standard browser mechanisms for launching the desktop application. This change will improve compatibility and reduce the potential for unexpected interactions with other local software on a user's workstation.

Please follow our download page for the announcement of a new update at: 8x8 Work

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