On June 23, Cisco decided to withdraw completely from Russia and Belarus. After that, some IT experts predicted potential problems with Cisco equipment, but not many could have predicted that this would happen.

“Yesterday, Cisco/Meraki took control of my personal Meraki devices, removed them from my account, reconfigured the access points (they now issue an explicit SSID like “12345-Sanctions” so anyone can join and access my home network), and claim them back. without any notice or refund “, Viktor Platov, a consulting engineer for Cisco wireless solutions, wrote on LinkedIn.

When customers raised similar concerns about Meraki’s public cloud a year ago, I always argued that this cannot happen in today’s open world.. Unfortunately I was wrong… I promise I will never buy, sell, use or recommend any Public Cloud solution because people still have no dignity or conscience… “, summed up Platov.

And although there are no reports of such an incident on the Meraki community site in the technical forums. According to the expert, Meraki representatives confirmed that this was done at the company’s decision. Status confirmed by at least two users of the Habr forum. Users also share photos of bricked network devices.

As a reminder, on March 3, Cisco disabled access to the network academy for students and instructors in the Russian Federation, and subsequently suspended all business activities in Russia. On May 26, 2022, the Cisco Webex webinar and web conferencing service stopped serving customers in the Russian Federation due to sanctions. On June 23, Cisco announced that it “has ceased all business operations, including sales and service provision in Russia and Belarus.”