Zoom down: Video call app breaks in the middle of the working day

Andrew Griffin
Tuesday 21 June 2022 11:13 EDT
Comments
Zoom meetings may ‘narrow cognitive focus’, study finds
Zoom meetings may ‘narrow cognitive focus’, study finds (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Your support helps us to tell the story

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.

At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.

The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.

Your support makes all the difference.

Zoom, the video call app, has broken in the middle of the working day.

Users said they were unable to get into meetings, likely leaving many remote offices struggling to work. The outage came at the beginning of the working day in the US, and as it came to a close in the UK – both key times for meetings.

Zoom – once a relatively obscure video conferencing app – saw a huge increase in users as the world shifted towards working from home. It could see even more than usual this week, amid UK rail strikes and other issues keeping people working at home.

Zoom’s status website said specifically that its web portal was seeing degraded performance, and that it applied only to a “subset of users”. But users across the world reported problems getting into meetings and using other parts of the online system.

The company said it was “investigating” the issue.

The problems came on a busy day for internet outages. Early on Tuesday, a Cloudflare issue took many of the world’s biggest websites offline for an hour; shortly after, Outlook was hit by a major outage that left people unable to see their emails.

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in