Zoom Is Down at the Worst Possible Time [Update: It's Back]

The same day that many schools are back in session, Zoom, the teleconferencing software that’s become the go-to for many educators’ remote-teaching needs for the foreseeable future, seems to have crashed for large swaths of the US.

While Zoom’s own Twitter account hasn’t mentioned the widespread outages thus far, Zoomers across the country have posted about the service failures. The outage reports seemingly ticked up earlier today with popular crash-monitoring service DownDetector receiving more than 8,000 outage reports by the time of this writing, beginning a little after 8am Eastern. For the most part, these reports came from major cities largely clustered on the East Coast including New York, Pittsburgh, and Washington. We attempted to connect to the service ourselves and were met with a similar error message.

“We have received reports of users being unable to start and join Zoom Meetings and Webinars,” a Zoom spokesperson told Gizmodo. “We are currently investigating and will provide updates as we have them. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience.”

Update 10:39am EST: Zoom has since clarified on Twitter that it has “identified the issue.” Full service is likely to be restored soon, however the company’s official status page still indicates “partial outages” of core features like meetings and the platform’s web client.

Update 12:46pm EST: The company’s status page now shows all Zoom functionality as fully restored. We’ve reached out for comment to determine what exactly went wrong and will update again if we hear back.