Major Problem For Cisco

Jennifer Ho, manager of Cisco's Business Critical Communications, spoke with CRN about a massive product replacement initiative impacting mission critical Cisco products including ASA firewalls, ISR routers, Nexus switches and Meraki cloud-based managed switches.

The "Clock Signal Component Issue" causes a number of Cisco products to fail after 18 months with the end result being "the system will stop functioning, will not boot and is not recoverable."

Cisco said the clock signal component inside certain devices degrades over time. "Although the Cisco products with these components are currently performing normally, we expect product failures to increase over the years beginning after the unit has been in operation for approximately 18 months," said Cisco in the notice posted on its website.