Video conferencing giant Zoom, which boasts over 300 million daily meeting participants, underwent outages yesterday in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Before 9 A.M. EST the company tweeted that it received reports from users who could not access the video conferencing service. The outage comes as many school districts and universities around the globe return to the classroom in hybrid and virtual forms. Take the Atlanta Public School System for instance, which was hit by the outage. There’s also Indiana University, which too reported outages.
Around 11:00 A.M., Zoom noted that it was working on a solution to the interruption, and around 12:40 P.M., Zoom said it had fixed the issue that led to the blackout that affected users in the U.S. and the U.K. A quick look at Down Detector, a site that shows there were over 16,000 reported outages. Today that number stands at almost 500 encountering interruptions according to the site which tracks the interruption of popular services such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Slack.
Zoom did not comment on what caused the outage, but some Twitter users gave us a glimpse of what went on, with one user Tweeting they could log in via Zoom’s mobile app, but not the desktop client., Tweeting at Zoom, that user added: “I signed in with my Facebook account and registered for a fee. But after that, I can no longer sign in with my Facebook account and get the message “Token has expired. Please try signing in again”. I’m very troubled because I paid a yearly contract.” Zoom Founder Eric Yuan and the company’s official account, both apologized for the outage via Twitter, writing:
“@Zoom.us had a service disruption that affected many of our customers. We know the responsibility we have to keep your meetings, classrooms, and important events running. I’m very sorry and we will all do our best to prevent this from happening in the future”
Zooms exploded in popularity during the novel Coronavirus and turned into a powerhouse, adding to Yuan’s vast fortune. During this period, the company embarked on a quest to enable end-to-end encryption, which was fraught with disappointments like the time Zoom said it would not extend end-to-end encryption to all users. The company later reversed the decision and offered encryption to all users – both free and paid.
Year-to-date, Zoom’s stocks are up more than 300 percent, although the company experienced a two percent drop off following news of the outage which lasted a few hours depending on your location. Zoom’s expanded the availability of its Zoom Phone offering, which, as of August, is available in over 40 countries. It’s added a host of other valuable features intended to improve the video conferencing experience as well and made some vital partnerships during the novel Coronavirus period.
Back in May, Zoom said it would suspend new ‘free’ user registrations in China and restrict ‘new’ user signups to enterprise customers who sign up through third-party partners. This could signify that the company’s one step closer to exiting the country altogether.
