Zoom outages struck this weekend, but it was quick with a fix

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Video conferencing platform Zoom, which has become a crutch for millions of users during the pandemic, suffered a widespread outage this weekend.

Users across the US and UK encountered issues with both hosting and joining meetings on Sunday, with the outage reportedly disrupting all manner of social activities - including virtual church services.

Zoom was quick with a fix, however, managing to resolve the issue within two hours of announcing the investigation via its service status page.

“Users should now be able to host, join and participate in Zoom Meetings and Zoom Video Webinars if they restart their sessions,” read a subsequent status update.

Zoom outage

Zoom has experienced a sharp uptick in user numbers during the pandemic and currently serves over 300 million daily meeting participants. 

Many now rely on the service not only to conduct business during the week, but also to socialize on the weekend, meaning the outage would likely have inconvenienced a significant number of users.

Zoom first recognised the issue with a post to its status page on Sunday at 10AM ET: “Our team is investigating the root cause of issues joining Zoom Meetings. These issues appear to be limited to a subset of users.”

By 11:39AM ET, the video conferencing giant had remedied the problem and published advice for affected users - although it did not disclose the nature of the issue.

“We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused,” said a Zoom spokesperson.

The service also experienced a blip in early April, with users in the US and Europe served error messages at login, but has for the most part held strong under the increased load brought about by the pandemic.

Via The Verge 

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Joel Khalili
News and Features Editor

Joel Khalili is the News and Features Editor at TechRadar Pro, covering cybersecurity, data privacy, cloud, AI, blockchain, internet infrastructure, 5G, data storage and computing. He's responsible for curating our news content, as well as commissioning and producing features on the technologies that are transforming the way the world does business.