Zoom Apologizes For ‘Disruption’ After Major Outage

‘Everything should be working properly now!’ according to Zoom on Twitter. ‘We are continuing to monitor the situation. Thank you all for your patience and our sincere apologies for the disruption.’

Zoom Video Communications apologized Thursday after a major outage knocked out service for users and said that everything was functional again.

“Everything should be working properly now!” according to Zoom on Twitter. “We are continuing to monitor the situation. Thank you all for your patience and our sincere apologies for the disruption.”

Downdetector reported that the outage began at 10:31 a.m. ET with more than 34,000 reports of outages as of 11:11 a.m. ET. The website showed outages were reported around the U.S. in Boston, New York City, Washington, D.C. and San Francisco.

As of 11:36 a.m. ET, Downdetector reported just over 2,600 users reporting outages.

By 11:49 a.m. ET, San Jose, Calif.-based Zoom reported on its service status page that the “incident has been resolved.”

Zoom has said it serves users from various co-located data centers located throughout the world and also uses Amazon Web Services and Oracle Cloud for the hosting of “certain critical aspects of our business, as well as Microsoft Azure for limited customer-specified managed services,” according to a regulatory filing from this past July.

Zac Paulson, the CEO of TrueIT, a Fargo, North Dakota-based MSP, told CRN that he advises his remote worker customers to always have a backup option for video conferencing services.

“Any company is susceptible to a cloud outage, nobody is perfect,” said Paulson. “We tell our clients it never hurts to have two different sources or multiple avenues of technology. Just like it is smart to have redundant power or internet access you need multiple videoconferencing services like Intermedia, Teams or Cisco Webex.”

David Stinner, president of US itek, a Tonawanda, New York-headquartered MSP, said the Zoom outage shows that the videoconferencing maker should be doubling down on its core videoconferencing service rather than looking at entering the email and calendaring markets to compete against Microsoft.

“There is no room in the SMB space for another email or calendar application,” he said. “Today’s events prove that Zoom would be better served by focusing on its core competency.”

Steve Burke contributed to this story.