#OutageAlert: Zoom goes down, keeping users from starting/joining meetings
What's the story
Following Gmail and Google Meet, video conferencing giant Zoom has also fallen victim to an outage. The service has been down for more than an hour, with users complaining about not being able to log in to their accounts and start, join virtual meetings for their work, classes, and other needs. Here's all you need to know about it.
Outage
Major outage, giving users logging in errors
At about 6:30 pm IST, Zoom users started flocking to Twitter with complaints about the video service. The majority of reports suggest that the users are getting vague error messages while trying to log into the account and failing to initiate or join meetings. The errors were mostly like "System can't login Zuora system (3,299)" and "There is no accout for Zuora account ID."
Scale
Problem widespread across the US
Going by the reports on Downdetector.in, the outage is widespread across the US and the UK in comparison to India, Australia, and other parts of the world. On its service status page, Zoom acknowledged the issue as a "partial outage" for meetings, webinars - its key business functions - as well as its web portal and the web client.
Work
Issue identified, work to fix underway
Zoom claims it has isolated the issue that is keeping users from logging in on its website, and a fix is in the works. The company said, "We have identified the issue causing users to be unable to authenticate to the Zoom website (zoom.us) and unable to start and join Zoom Meetings and Webinars, and we are working on a fix for this issue."
Twitter Post
Some users also got billing errors
We have received reports of users being unable to start and join Zoom Meetings and Webinars. We are currently investigating and will provide updates as we have them. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience. Please follow https://t.co/aqz5nS7fZY.
— Zoom (@zoom_us) August 24, 2020
Impact
Outage has affected many professionals, students
Evidently, the outage has left many teachers, professionals, and learners frustrated. Zoom became popular in the first place due to its ability to let large groups of people interact and work in a virtual environment - something that was needed in the COVID-19-hit world. Now, with this outage, it is failing at just that, affecting the work/classes of many.