If you were using Zoom on the afternoon of Wednesday 16th April Eastern Time in the US, you would have lost services for nearly two hours. This affected multiple Zoom services, since the zoom.us domain was unavailable to access. According to their official report covering the incident, some international regions were also affected by the outage.
Zoom is a communications tool used by many people around the world. They provide a range of video, audio, and chat services used by individuals and businesses in assorted countries.
So, what happened?
According to the Zoom report covering the incident, there was an error in communication between the registrar used by Zoom – Markmonitor – and the GoDaddy registry. This meant that zoom.us was accidentally shut down, causing an ongoing issue for nearly two hours.
Zoom was keen to point out that it had not suffered a DDoS attack or indeed any other issue on their end. This server block was identified and removed as quickly as possible, allowing the full suite of Zoom services to come back into use.
GoDaddy provides a Registry Lock service for its customers, and it appears that Zoom has now elected to put this in place for their zoom.us domain name. As their report states, this should prevent anything similar from occurring again in future.
It’s not known how many people were affected by the issue, but many will have found themselves unable to join any Zoom meetings during the outage. According to the report, any users who were already taking part in meetings should have been able to continue. However, no one could access or join a meeting that hadn’t yet started.
The quick actions to identify and resolve the issue were commendable, but downtime amounting to almost two hours will have caused inconvenience at best for many. It does show how far-reaching a server block can be when it occurs.
Online services like Zoom enjoyed a huge rise in popularity during the pandemic, with more people working from home and connecting in different ways. Its popularity has continued since then, providing an essential tool to connect people in businesses that are spread around the country and indeed the world. However, this shows that the occasional rare outage can cause significant issues, although it does seem as though it was researched, identified, and resolved at speed in this case.
Updates were provided throughout, and a DNS cache flush was recommended for anyone who was still having trouble accessing the zoom.us website. While service interruptions like this are rare, they can cause extensive issues when they do occur, with meetings missed and work unable to be completed. While picking up the phone might have proven a suitable alternative for some, group meetings would not have been available for a while.
Still, given the prompt response, it seems unlikely that anyone would ditch the Zoom service and go elsewhere. Since they’ve imposed steps to ensure nothing like it happens again, this should hopefully be a one-off.