This article is more than 1 year old
Oh dear, what a pity! It seems you can't join the directors at the Zoom meeting today
Not great news for students going back to school, however
Zoom says it's fingered "the issue" preventing users from authenticating to the Zoom website, or starting and joining Zoom meetings and webinars, so if you thought you'd miss the 4pm "quick catch-up" with sales, your hopes are getting slimmer.
The BlueJeans, Jabber and Webex rival said ominously at 13:50 UTC (14:50 UK time) that it was "working on a fix".
Reports of Zoom going boom started coming in around 12:51 UTC (13:51 UK time), with thousands telling third-party outage monitor DownDetector that they could not log in, join a meeting or obtain a Zoom server connection.
This is the third time office productivity software has been hit with the outage stick in a matter of days. On Thursday last week, Google cloud services across the world had a lie-down, with multiple GCP products including App Engine, Cloud Storage, Cloud Logging and BigQuery out of reach, and users managing only patchy access to the cloud giant's key business productivity suite apps, including Gmail, Google Drive, Docs, Chat, Meet, Keep, and Voice.
Concurrently, users of cloud-comms botherer Slack also suffered connection issues stretching over a period of nine-plus hours before the services were restored. It explained last week that: "On August 19, 2020, at 5:30 p.m. PDT, we deployed a change in the connection process to some of our servers in the APAC region. A bug in the new code caused some of the API calls to be invalid, which resulted in connection problems for people. We rolled back the update and stabilized the affected servers. We returned to a healthy state by August 20, 3:58 a.m. PDT."
And while you may simply be missing having to talk to your team, or give tech support to your uncle, save a thought for the students beginning their first day of university after finishing high school during COVID-19 lockdown:
A number of Penn State professors are reporting technical problems with Zoom just an hour into the university's first day of classes. https://t.co/pfzEVImvW0
— Onward State (@OnwardState) August 24, 2020
The Reg has asked Zoom for comment. ®