Zoom Suffers Major Global Meetings Outage, Has Now Recovered, Also Names Kimberly Storin CMO to Lead Branding For Its AI Collaboration Platform
Zoom experienced a major global outage on Wednesday affecting a substantial chunk of its user base.
From around 2:45pm EST/7:45pm BST, Zoom’s service status page indicated “partial outages” affecting its flagship Zoom Meetings service and the ability to access Zoom’s website.
Zoom has since shed light on what transpired, posted on its status page in the past incidents section.
Zoom’s statement reads:
Resolved – On April 16, between 2:25 P.M. ET and 4:12 P.M. ET, the domain zoom.us was not available due to a server block by GoDaddy Registry. This block was the result of a communication error between Zoom’s domain registrar, Markmonitor, and GoDaddy Registry, which resulted in GoDaddy Registry mistakenly shutting down zoom.us domain.”
“Zoom, Markmonitor and GoDaddy worked quickly to identify and remove the block, which restored service to the domain zoom.us. There was no product, security or network failure at Zoom during the outage. GoDaddy and Markmonitor are working together to prevent this from happening again.”
During the outage, some users encountered an “Unable to Connect” error when attempting to join meetings, while others were unable to log in altogether. Compounding the disruption, the Zoom website was completely inaccessible, displaying a 502 Bad Gateway error.
In other Zoom news, the business has appointed Kimberly Storin as its new Chief Marketing Officer to oversee the branding and communications of the AI-powered all-in-one collaboration platform.
At Zoom, Storin will lead the company’s brand, communications, product marketing, enterprise marketing, and regional marketing functions. She takes over from Janine Pelosi, who departed Zoom in 2023 to become CEO of video collaboration company Neat.
Tariff Uncertainty Sees Logitech Withdraw FY2026 Guidance
The earthquake of President Donald Trump’s on-again/off-again tariffs continues to have repercussions for the tech world, and the chaos sparked by the current climate recently caused collaboration device vendor Logitech to take drastic action.
While the company stresses its confidence in delivering on its current fiscal year targets, the unpredictability has catalysed a strategic retreat from longer-term forecasting—it withdrew its outlook for the 2026 financial year entirely last weekend, citing the “continuing uncertainty” of Trump’s tariffs.
Logitech’s comment on the situation said:
Logitech withdrew its outlook for Fiscal Year 2026 given the continuing uncertainty of the tariff environment.”
This comes as the Trump administration implements a significant expansion of import tariffs affecting a wide range of tech hardware components and finished products. The administration’s ongoing aggressive trade stance toward China and other prominent manufacturing hubs has resulted in anarchy in supply chain economics for tech manufacturers, with a particular impact on companies heavily invested in physical collaboration tools and peripherals.
Is this the canary in the coal mine for UC and collaboration vendors?
WhatsApp Launches Channels Video Updates and a Raft of Other Enterprise-Friendly Features
WhatsApp is rolling out 12 new capabilities, many with compelling enterprise-friendly possibilities, including video notes for channels.
The new group chat online indicator offers real-time visibility into team availability, improving coordination and decision-making. The “Notify for” feature helps manage notification overload, ensuring only key updates are highlighted. Event-planning tools streamline scheduling, while iPhone users now have a built-in document scanner for sharing paperwork.
Video enhancements include pinch-to-zoom, seamless call escalation, and improved call quality. Additionally, WhatsApp now offers transcribed voice messages in Channels and QR codes for easy audience connection, optimizing communication and engagement.
