Zoom’s Monday Blues Affects its Video Conferencing Services Globally

Zoom is getting us through WFH but what happens when the popular video chat application goes down. On early Monday morning, Zoom suffered an outage that impacted users across the U.S. and the U.K. The company restored services by afternoon but didn’t cite the cause of this unplanned downtime.  

Zoom video conferencing and webinars services were subject to a service outage on Monday. Users initially started reporting issues early in the day at around 8:30 AM EDT according to DowndeteOpens a new window cOpens a new window torOpens a new window . Issues ranged from being ‘unable to visit the Zoom website (zoom.us) and unable to start and join Zoom Meetings and Webinars’. 

According to a Zoom user Kamilah Sanders, there were no service disruptions on the Zoom desktop or mobile applications. She commentedOpens a new window on Downdetector, “To those still experiencing problems accessing Zoom, at my school, we found that using the desktop/laptop application or the mobile Zoom app allowed us to access Zoom. Apparently, there is just an issue with the web version. Hope this helps someone.”

Going by this and some other user comments, this can mean two things:

1. Either only web interface was impacted
2. Different users faced different levels of disruptions

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Maximum issues pertained to not being able to log-in (69%), with 17% facing issues in joining conferences and 12% reporting server connection issues.

The service outage caused disruptions across the entire eastern United States, United Kingdom, and small parts of other countries. Zoom managed to restore normal service operations by 1:10 PM EDT when it updatedOpens a new window users with: “Resolved – We have resolved the issue causing some users to be unable to start and join Zoom Meetings and Webinars or manage aspects of their account on the Zoom website.”

Today @zoom_usOpens a new window had a service disruption that affected many of our customers. We know the responsibility we have to keep your meetings, classrooms & important events running. I’m personally very sorry & we will all do our best to prevent this from happening in the future.

— Eric S. Yuan (@ericsyuan) August 24, 2020Opens a new window

The outage started early in the day and was contained within 5 to 6 hours by 1 PM in the afternoon, peaking at around 10 PM EDT with 16,851 problem reports. This has affected businesses, education activities (many of which were the first of the academic year), as well as the company’s NASDAQ listing, which was down 2.55% by the end of Monday’s trade. 

Zoom’s share price has nearly tripled since March. Taking into consideration the company’s monumental growth since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, this can be regarded as a blip in the otherwise upward trend. 

See Also: Google Issues a Fix for Gmail Outage, but Offers No Explanation

The company’s rise has been marred by security concerns since it came into the public limelight as one of the fastest growing video conferencing apps. Meanwhile, CEO Eric Yuan introduced several measures under the 90-day plan. Despite this, problems continue to surface at rapid clip. 

Zoom failed to comment on the reason for yesterday’s outage. 

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