Jabra headset stops working during Skype calls

This issue has been bugging me, or my Skype user colleagues to be more precise, since the anniversary update of Windows 10. The symptoms goes like this: during a call the user’s microphone will stop working. Most of the times, but not always, there will be an error message within the Skype client stating that “your microphone stopped working”. Other times the other party will just be like “Hello? You there?” and finally hang up.
For some of my colleagues working in the Customer support center the problem was getting really frustrating – as customers would think that she intentionally hung up or left the call intentionally.

As the problem was not affecting more than a few users it seemed logical that it was related to the client computer itself; mainly the headset, the Skype client, some Windows update or a driver issue. The problem was also only affecting Windows 10 users. The quick fix would always be to restart the Skype client, and the microphone would work again, but some minutes into a call it would stop working over again.

As we have kind of “standardized” on the Jabra UC Voice 150 Duo for the general user we first tried replacing the headset with a newer one, suspecting it was faulty. But, no. Running updates on Office, running a “repair” on Office, updating drivers directly from the manufacturer etc. Nothing seemed to help, the problem persisted.

Then I came to think about some Jabra software I used to run on my PC, because I was using a bluetooth headset for both my cell phone and (back then) Lync – and I was struggling to get the call control from the headset working. I remembered that there was some firmware update on the headset itself – could this be something to try?

Downloading and installing Jabra Direct software quickly revealed that there was indeed firmware updates to consider. After updating the user’s “faulty” headset the problem was gone! My colleague has now been using her old headset for a couple of weeks without any microphone problems.

So keep in mind: Apart from the usual program or driver updates that are often to blame, there is also firmware on the device itself that might be causing problems.

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