SCPIE: Zoom Goes Down as Kids Go Back to Virtual School

Everything’s back to normal now, but Zoom was experiencing issues for several hours this morning.

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August 24, 2020 2 min read

This story originally appeared on PC Mag

UPDATE 12:45 P.M. ET: Zoom says it has “resolved the issue causing users to be unable to start and join Zoom Meetings and Webinars. Users are now also able to sign up for paid accounts, upgrade, and manage their service on the Zoom website.” It is now ‘monitoring to ensure that these services are operational.”

Everything should be working properly now! We are continuing to monitor the situation. Thank you all for your patience and our sincere apologies for disrupting your day.

— Zoom (@zoom_us) August 24, 2020

Original Story:
Many millions of people have come to rely on video conferencing services in recent months to keep in contact with friends and family. Mostly these platforms have held up well, but today was a step too far for Zoom it seems.

As ZDNet reports, Zoom is currently down. It just so happens to be the day that millions of students are attempting to go back to school, which in a lot of cases means logging on to virtual classrooms. The result seems to be users of Zoom in the U.S. and UK pushing the service beyond its limits.

Image Credit: DownDetector.com via PCMag

The Zoom status page confirms an incident has occurred and an investigation is underway, “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.” That message appeared less than an hour ago at the time of writing.

According to DownDetector.com, problems started around 8 a.m. ET, with most of the reported problems (73 percent) affecting logins.

It may be difficult for teachers and students to quickly switch to an alternative video streaming service, so many will simply be waiting until Zoom comes back online, or deciding to give up today and try again tomorrow. That will ultimately result in another big spike in demand tomorrow morning, but hopefully Zoom will be well prepared by then with additional server capacity on hand to cope.