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.
The company says that a miscommunication between domain management services—specifically, Markmonitor and the GoDaddy Registrar—triggered a disruption affecting the “zoom.us” domain. This glitch temporarily disabled several of Zoom’s essential functionalities. The companies involved collaborated swiftly to resolve the problem. According to Zoom, the incident did not stem from any product, security, or infrastructure failure.
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.”
Additionally, Zoom posted on X, confirming that service had been restored.
Service has now been restored after the earlier outage, and we sincerely appreciate your patience and understanding.
— Zoom (@Zoom) April 16, 2025
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. Even Zoom’s press contact email was temporarily nonfunctional during the incident.
More Information On What Happened
At the height of the disruption, outage tracking site Down Detector recorded over 55,000 user reports at 3:15 PM EST. At 3:17 PM EST, Zoom acknowledged it was investigating issues affecting various parts of its platform. By 3:51 PM EST, the company provided a more detailed update, stating:
“We continue to investigate the domain name resolution issues on the zoom.us domain that are affecting multiple services. More updates to follow.”
Zoom resolved the issue by 4PM EST, and the number of incident reports has since substantially declined.
At 4:55 PM EST, Zoom updated its status page to confirm that services had been restored following the nearly two-hour outage. The company advised users still experiencing connection issues to flush their DNS cache and attempt to reconnect.
Zoom also stated it would continue to monitor the situation and provided instructions for clearing the DNS cache. For Windows users, the solution involved opening a Command Prompt and entering the command ipconfig /flushdns. On macOS, users were instructed to open a Terminal window and type sudo dscacheutil -flushcache; sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder.
Notably, this was not an issue limited to a specific region, such as being a US-exclusive error, but impacted Zoom users everywhere.
What Other Major Zoom News Has Happened Recently?
It’s been a busy start to April for the collaboration giant.
Earlier this week, Zoom 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 oversee the company’s brand strategy, communications, and all facets of marketing—including product, enterprise, and regional efforts. She succeeds Janine Pelosi, who left the company in 2023 to become CEO of video collaboration firm Neat.
Meanwhile, last week, Zoom launched its AI-powered task and project management capability, Zoom Tasks, to supercharge business productivity.
Integrated within Zoom Workplace, Zoom Tasks leverages AI to automatically extract action items from meeting summaries and chat threads throughout the day. It can also help execute certain tasks on behalf of users—pending their review and approval. By keeping teams aligned and informed, this feature enhances collaboration and supports more consistent project execution.
Finally, also last week, Workvivo by Zoom launched Workvivo AI to enhance the employee experience.
Workvivo AI—now fully embedded into the Workvivo platform and powered by Zoom AI Companion—is designed to boost team efficiency and amplify organizational impact. Aimed at internal communications, HR leaders, and platform administrators, the tool simplifies day-to-day tasks, enabling users to shift their focus toward higher-value, strategic priorities.
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