A method and system to preserve group call audio during a cloud-based group call service upgrade are provided. Audio duplication requests are received and managed through a message broker and instances of an audio distribution service. When a determination is made that an audio distribution service needs to be upgraded, the group call is preserved by generating new instances of the audio distribution service. The new instances of the audio distribution service are added to a queue of the message broker, and old instance of the audio duplication service are gracefully shutdown. Each new instance of the audio distribution service is used to route an audio stream associated with each of the original audio duplication requests, while the olds instances of the audio duplication service are being gracefully shutdown.