Access Points Disconnecting and Dropping Off Completely

[cliffatSwift]

This issue started around the beginning of 2025. It is affecting multiple locations throughout the US with different Meraki AP models (MR42, MR44, CW91641, etc.).

What appears to be taking place is gradually the AP will start losing its “up-stream” connection with the Meraki cloud and will eventually drop-off completely.

Each of our APs would receive this message.

Initially, we were told by Meraki TAC to make sure that the Meraki IP’s and TCP/UDP ports were open on our firewall, and our firewall engineers verified that they were. But this didn’t make any sense to us, since “up-stream” traffic does not pass through the firewall. There’s no need to have outgoing traffic past through a firewall.

After much discussion with our engineers, it appears that the Meraki cloud is having issues with recognizing our "Up-stream" DHCP IP communication.

I know this to be true, because I have implemented a temporary work-around using a “Static IP” on the APs having this issue. Once implemented, our APs came back online and are still operating fine for the past 4 weeks.

Does the Meraki team have a solution that will address this specific issue?

[Mloraditch]

It sounds like your APs are having trouble getting/renewing DHCP, if they work fine static. I would be checking your DHCP servers logs, doing packet captures of dhcp requests/responses and maybe testing on the same vlan with a laptop.

[PhilipDAth]

> since “up-stream” traffic does not pass through the firewall.

Upstream traffic to the Meraki cloud will need to pass through the firewall.

[alemabrahao]

+ 1 to check DHCP

[MaghM]

Make sure the traffic is passing on your upstream firewall, if you navigate to help>firewall info on first rule you would be able to see the required Meraki cloud address range.