"Having difficulty establishing a connection" Is Fusion 360 cloud service down or broken?

[graham.wideman]

I tried to fire up F360 an hour and a half ago, and have had a parade of problems, culminating in FINALLY getting F360 to start... but the data panel is stuck at "Having difficulty establishing a connection"... so I can't get to any of the projects I need to work on.

1. F360 very slow and can't launch browser window to log in:  The very initial problem was F360 taking several minutes stuck on initial splash screen, then gets to a login display, with a button to login by launching a web browser. Except it never launched the browser. I followed forum suggestions to change default browser. Each F360 restart required several minutes as before.

2. Reinstall F360? I rebooted, and attempted to uninstall F360 to see if a reinstall would help.  That too was very slow. Eventually got to a "survey" asking why I'm uninstalling. This line of Q & A led to the suggestion to install "Autodesk desktop app" with a link.  That process is confused due to the name now being "Autodesk Access".

3. Detour to install Autodesk Access:  ... I went ahead and installed that.  The idea is that this app provides its own login capability which also enables F360 to run, though its main purpose is to look out for Autodesk updates and install them. 

4. Access experience not inspiring, but did something: On first running Access, it too was extremely slow to do anything. It took probably over 5 minutes in a couple of cycles of searching for Autodesk applications, and then searching for updates.  Eventually it was happy.  I then went to fire up F360... but apparently it had got uninstalled. (Ie: the "why are you uninstalling" with advice did not override the uninstall).

5. Reinstall F360:   So I went through the process of downloading Fusion 360 Client Downloader.exe and running it.  After 5 or 10 minutes it was done.

6. F360... extreme slow launch: I then fired up the newly installed F360.  It hung at the initial splash screen, then a blank screen. After over 6 minutes it finally got to the normal F360 desktop window... but...

7. F360 can't connect: as noted above, the data panel had only the message "Having difficulty establishing a connection."

In retrospect, all of these excruciatingly slow and failing steps could be due to a server down or messed up somewhere. (One of the reasons why users hate programs that are tied to cloud services.)

I'm running Windows 10 Pro 22H2

Anybody have any insight into this?

[RajkumarIlanchelian]

@graham.wideman We are not aware of any degrades to our cloud services at this time.

1.Could you please try see if there is a possibility to restart your router? It's possible that a slow network could lead to the issues you are seeing. 

2. Would it also be possible to see if you can connect to another network (like a cell phone hotspot) to see if that makes any difference? 

3. If none of the above helps, can you Go into Fusion 360 - Help - support and diagnostics - Fusion service utility - gather system info - attach the diagnostics logs.zip file that gets generated? 

[graham.wideman]

1. Router unlikely to be the problem, since all other network activities are working fine and quickly (like posting this reply).  My PC is on wired ethernet, and the WAN is over cable internet. But I will reboot shortly.

2. I don't have an easy way to connect to another network.

3. I will follow your step 3 in a few minutes.

[graham.wideman]

I have:

1. Installed a few pending Windows updates, and restarted the PC.

2. Restarted the WAN cable modem/router.

3. Launched Autodesk Access, which started quickly, and showed me as logged in. (This to supposedly clear the way for F360.)

4. On launching Fusion 360, it continues to do the same thing as before -- after some time, gets to blank screen, then hangs. Eventually it showed the F360 UI after over 6.5 minutes. And as before, "Having difficulty establishing a connection", so no projects available.

5. I used the Service Utility Menu > Gather System Info, and will attach the resulting zip files below.

[RajkumarIlanchelian]

@graham.wideman Thank you for the logs. Can you go to the below urls and send me back what the results are?

1. https://js.prd.fusionapi.autodesk.com/hds/fusion360.json
2. https://developer.api.autodesk.com/consumption/v1/users/2MFNLA8S4DQH/account
3. https://login.autodesk360.com/login/api/hubs

The logs shows that we are not able to connect to some of the above urls that are needed for Fusion 360. 

[graham.wideman]

1. https://js.prd.fusionapi.autodesk.com/hds/fusion360.json

Redirects to:

https://js.prd.fusionapi.autodesk.com/hds/fusion360.json?_ga=2.188320609.818448864.1697051601-942842...

Result:

id	"fusion360"
name	"Fusion 360"
previous_status	"operational"
previous_status_legacy	"Operational"
since_time	"2023-10-04T22:08:43.631Z"
status	"operational"
status_badge	"Operational"
updated_at	"2023-10-04T22:08:43.631Z"

2. https://developer.api.autodesk.com/consumption/v1/users/2MFNLA8S4DQH/account

Redirects to:

https://developer.api.autodesk.com/consumption/v1/users/2MFNLA8S4DQH/account?_ga=2.188320609.8184488...

Result:

developerMessage	"Token is not provided in the request."
moreInfo	"https://forge.autodesk.com/en/docs/oauth/v2/developers_guide/error_handling/"
errorCode	"AUTH-010"

3. https://login.autodesk360.com/login/api/hubs

No redirect

errors
headers
time-taken	"0"
request-id	"a360_prod_ip-10-8-98-172.ec2.internal_ee1_413dd58a873ab_43e4"
served-by	"https://www.autodesk.com/fusion-team"
served-at	"1697064107615"
api-version	"master.74a863b2ea"
csrf-cookie-name	"a360_csrf_cookie"
error
id	"MESSAGE_NOT_AUTHORISED"
messageKey	"MESSAGE_NOT_AUTHORISED"
message	"You don't have required permission to access this resource"

[graham.wideman]

Also, Service Utility Menu > Network Diagnostic Test shows all green checkmarks.

[RajkumarIlanchelian]

@graham.wideman Thank you for all the information you have provided so far. I am going to see what other information we will need to get to the bottom of this. I am connecting with another engineering team on this. 

[graham.wideman]

I appreciate your efforts.

Update: Today the problem appears to have cleared up. When launched, Fusion 360 now takes say 20 secs to start up (instead of nearly 7 minutes), and most importantly, can see the projects on your cloud server.  If I explicitly log out, the F360 login step is able to tell a web browser to present the login page. [*]

I have changed nothing on the PC in question, I have not even rebooted it.  I have barely even used it as I was offsite today.

But that doesn't mean the issue is closed.  I now need to know WHY the failure occurred, so that I know

(a) whether it's something I have control over so I can detect and fix it next time, and

(b) if this was a problem on Autodesk's end, how likely it is that Autodesk might at any moment suffer the same service outage and prevent me from completing work that needs to be delivered.

So I would appreciate the full story on why F360 suddenly works today when it did not yesterday.

[RajkumarIlanchelian]

@graham.wideman @Glad this is working but I hear you. 

I have more engineers take a look at the logs and the suspension is either a proxy or anti-virus that is slowing things down. It took about 30 seconds to hit various Autodesk services and there was time out happening. 

if you can attach your logs again from today I can point out the differences I what was happening. 

[graham.wideman]

Thanks again for replying, and offering to compare the log files.  I have attached today's logs.

By the way, in case it matters for timestamps, I'm in San Diego, so PDT at the moment.

• The only AV Im running is standard Windows Defender.
• As for a Proxy, if you mean accessing the internet via a proxy server, then that is not the case for me. Neither a proxy nor a VPN.