Yes, Google Meet (Duo) group video calls were broken for a week

Abner Li | Jul 6 2023 - 4:31 pm PT

Meet is the video calling service that Google wants you to use. However, Duo’s functionality still lives on, and group video calling in Google Meet was broken for a whole week.

The Duo brand is gone, but you’re still using technology from that service when you make a direct group video call that doesn’t involve clicking on a meet.google.com link.

This “Google Duo group call” — which also offers a duo.app.goo.gl/xxxxx URL for fast joining — issue started a week ago (June 29) and resulted in “degraded audio quality (metallic noise in the background) for all client types (iOS, Android, Web).” I personally experienced this issue, and it was essentially impossible to hold a conversation.

1:1 calls or “Google Meet meetings” were not impacted, so there was an in-app solution but not the most obvious or straightforward workaround.

Google Duo vs. Google Meet calling

Google says the “root cause of the issue was an incorrect configuration change that handles parsing of audio from the source.” The issue was addressed earlier today after 7 days, 1 hour, and 5 minutes of problems.

The company is providing a full incident report, but it’s pretty interesting how Google Duo implementations are still in use and haven’t been consolidated yet to the video calling system to which Google is committing all its resources.

Meanwhile, the “Google Meet (original)” app still exists on Android and iOS, while the unified Google Meet homescreen (found in the app that was previously Duo before the big update) is not yet found in Gmail’s Meet tab.