[Update: Mar. 01] These workarounds for Google Meet "You can't join this video call" issue should help as you wait for official fix

New updates are being added at the bottom of this story…….

Original story (published on November 04, 2020) follows:

Google Meet grew massively during the COVID-19 pandemic. With more users also comes a surge in bug reports, and one such bug is where Google Meet users are met with a “You can’t join this video call” error message.

As a result, the official Google Meet forum has seen hundreds of complaints since the past couple of months. A few instances of the complaints can be found on Reddit as well.

Having an issue where students will get dropped out of a google meet and when they try to rejoin they are met with an error saying “You can’t join this video call”

Student can join other google meet meetings. Others can join the first meeting. I can login the account of the student and try to join the first meeting, and it shows up the same error(not a device/IP issue)

Anyone run into this? It seems it auto-resolves itself after a few hours… which sucks..
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Having the same problem across multiple teachers, meet links, and schools in our district as well. Looking for a solution.
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Users facing this issue reportedly cannot join Google Meet video calls. Upon an attempt to join, they are greeted with a “You can’t join this video call” message and are asked to “return to home screen”.

The issue seems to be effecting certain accounts and changing the platform; for example switching from PC to phone, doesn’t help at all. The only workaround is switching accounts, which isn’t usually possible.

Thank you for the detailed reports. I’ve passed them on to Meet. It would also help if you reported it in the meeting.

How to report an issue in Google Meet: https://support.google.com/meet/answer/7291340
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Apparently the Product Engineering Team are actively working on the issue – which has been raised to high priority. Let’s hope they get it fixed ASAP.
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As seen above, the issue was escalated to the Google Meet team given the volume of complaints. However, it has been a couple of months and a fix still doesn’t seem to be in sight.

A similar problem has also been reported where participants get stuck on a “waiting for permission” page. It is quite possible that the two issues are related, given their similar nature.

Due to this, the workarounds given below can be tried by affected Google Meet users to address both issues.

One band-aid is to have the teacher manually add the student back into the Meet through the Add Person button. After that, the link will start working again.
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Our district has managed to fix this problem by having the teachers manually add the students back to the meet via the “Add people” button under the people tab in the meet window. They manually type in the students name who can’t rejoin and invite them. The student then uses the same link that wasn’t working before and it works after that invite.
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You can also try logging out and logging in again from your Google account.

Initially, the issue was linked to changes in the ‘knocking’ system. You can read about the update here.

However, on further investigation, that does not seem to be the case. The problem appears to be a bug with Google Meet itself. Hopefully, Google will address and fix the issue soon.

That being said, let us know if the above workarounds worked for the Google Meet’s “You can’t join this video call” issue.

After months of waiting, a Google product expert recently implied that Google may have addressed this issue with the recent Meet update that lets teachers “End meeting for all” instead of removing students when a class is over.

Also, worth noting is that:

Participants can access the meeting link for a meeting that ended, but can’t join until the meeting organizer restarts the meeting. The meeting will automatically restart once the organizer re-joins.
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Does this actually address your concern? Do let us know in your comments below.

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