Can’t Schedule Meeting with AWS Chime

Blank screen when you hit the schedule button

TLDR; Did a free trial just end? Delete everything and create a new Chime account in your AWS account.

I was teaching an Azure Cloud Security Class and on the 6th of a 6-week class I went in to schedule the class session with AWS Chime and no matter what I did, it wouldn’t work.

When I hit the schedule button I got a blank screen. I also got errors that said I didn’t have access to schedule a meeting and to contact an administrator or something to that effect.

Any time you think about writing an error message that says “Contact your administrator” DON’T. Stop right there. I don’t know how many times I got an error like this when I am the administrator! It's not helpful. As a developer you should be able to see the role that is logged in and know that the person is an administrator, or just don't do it. Provide a useful error message.

I tried various things like deleting and re-adding users or using new users to schedule a meeting but nothing I tried worked.

In addition, I was going to try to login to an old account to set up a meeting, but I couldn't login. Then I couldn't reset the password on the old account, and I also couldn't set up a new account, because at that moment, I couldn't get either SMS text messages or emails. The problem with the email messages may have been me but I don't know what was going on with the text messages. But I shouldn't have to do all that in the first place.

I submitted a support request about an hour before my meeting. I don’t know if some error message went to some email but that wasn’t helpful. Either they didn’t send it in time or it went to some mailbox and I didn’t notice it. I was busy trying to fix the problem in this urgent situation and don’t have time to be staring at an email inbox wondering if and when a message will show up.

Fix: Need a number to call! 
Also: Do not tell me to sign up for support to pay to report bugs and system issues. It seems like if you pay for a service it should work? IDK.

At any rate, I finally fixed this by completely deleting everything to do with Chime in my AWS account which is part of an AWS Organization and associated with SSO. Then I completely re-created everything to do with Chime in that account and it worked.

That ^^^ is ok for me with just a couple of users. That is NOT OK for a large organization that would need to remove and re-add 1000’s of users.
I hope AWS fixes this soon. I got lucky. If my client was cantankerous (they were not) it could have cost me money.

What I realized later, is that I had an expired free trial. None of the error messages said anything about a free trial ending. None of the error messages clearly told me how to fix the problem.

In fact, I never wanted a free trial. I thought that by signing up for AWS Chime Pro and because I had had a Chime account in another AWS account I would just get charged. I was simply moving things around because I am in the process of restructuring.

The timing of this issue with inability to schedule meetings in relation to the free trial ending leads me to believe that was the issue. If you have set up Chime as a free trial…be aware of this and plan ahead. Hopefully it gets fixed.

By the way, other than that, I haven’t had a problem with Chime — except when some of the pentesters in my cloud security class I believe found a way to kick me off. Also someone got on our AWS meetup and started sending attack strings to the chat, but I don’t *think* that did any harm. For the most part, Chime has worked just fine for me. I have seen other general complaints and nothing specific. I don’t know if I’m just not doing what those other people are doing because it has been fine for me so far.

If this helped you or you had this problem, please clap!

Teri Radichel

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