Not now Zoom! Video-calling service goes down in the UK and US leaving thousands of users unable to join conferences – after earlier outages took out Discord, Shopify and Outlook
- Video-calling service Zoom appears to be experiencing a major global outage
- Thousands of users around the world claim they are unable to join conferences
- The outage comes as millions of Brits have been forced to work from home amid the national rail strikes
Video-calling service Zoom appears to be experiencing a major global outage, leaving thousands of users around the world unable to join conferences.
Problems started at around 15:17 BST (10.17 EDT) and are ongoing, according to the website Downdetector, which monitors website outages.
Users in the US and the UK were both reporting being unable to join or start conferences via the website or the app.
The company’s service status page is reporting ‘degraded performance’ for users of its Web Portal.
‘We have received reports of a subset of users being unable to access to Zoom Web Portal. We are currently investigating and will provide updates as we have them,’ a note on the site posted at 15:38 BST (10:38 EDT) reads.
A further update posted at 15.59 BST states: ‘We have resolved the issue causing a subset of users to be unable to access to Zoom Web Portal.We will continue to monitor and provide updates as we have them.’
The outage comes as millions of Brits have been forced to work from home due to the national rail strikes.
Video-calling service Zoom appears to be experiencing a major global outage, leaving thousands of users around the world unable to join conferences
Downdetector UK tweeted the news that Zoom was experiencing problems via its official Twitter account
Problems started at around 15:17 BST and are ongoing, according to the website Downdetector, which monitors website outages
Thousands in the UK claim they are unable to join or start conferences via the website or the app.
The US also appears to be experiencing problems, with New York, Chicago, Washington and Boston highlighted as hotspots on Downdetector’s map
Numbers are much higher in the US, with over 13,500 reports of issues
Zoom users in both the UK and the US took to Twitter to express their frustration (and in some cases delight) at the outage.
‘Zoom is down and honestly we should just take the day off,’ one user wrote.
‘What a great way to start my morning at work, zoom being down,’ wrote a US-based user, with an image of an upside down smiley face.
‘Zoom being down just in time for everyone’s 9:00AM staff meetings is a mood,’ wrote another.
However, the glee was evident in some of the messages posted on the social network.
‘Zoom being down on a day you have a meeting is the closest thing an adult will get to a snow day ever again,’ another user wrote.
Zoom users in both the UK and the US took to Twitter to express their frustration (and in some cases delight) at the outage
Microsoft’s Outlook email platform was also hit by service issue this afternoon making it inaccessible to some users.
The company confirmed the problem and said it was working to fix it, with no other services currently appearing to be impacted.
According to Microsoft’s own service status website, some Outlook users ‘may be unable to access their mailboxes via any connection method’ and may encounter ‘delays sending, receiving or accessing email messages’.
Microsoft’s Outlook email platform has been hit by service issues making it inaccessible to some users
According to the website monitoring service Down Detector, affected users are seeing messages telling them they have been unable to connect to a server, and are struggling to connect to the service from across a range of devices
What is a content delivery network?
A content delivery network (CDN) is a platform of servers that helps minimize delays in loading web page content.
Jake Moore, a cybersecurity specialist at ESET, explains: ‘Web pages are located all over the world so content delivery networks are placed to distribute the data evenly by reducing the physical distance between where it’s actually held and the end user. This helps users around the world view the same high quality information and content without any lag or slow loading times.’
More than half of the internet’s traffic is served by a CDN, according to internet services company Akamai.
In a statement on the site, Microsoft said: ‘We’re continuing to analyse service monitoring telemetry to identify the next troubleshooting steps to mitigate the impact.’
The company added that the issue was specific to some users in Europe.
In an update, Microsoft said: ‘We’ve identified that our traffic management infrastructure is not working as expected.
‘We’ve successfully routed traffic to an alternate traffic management method, and we’re seeing an improvement in service availability since this process completed.
‘We’re continuing to monitor the service availability as it improves, while we determine the root cause.’
According to Down Detector, affected users are seeing messages telling them they have been unable to connect to a server, and are struggling to connect to the service from across a range of devices.
The monitoring service showed it began receiving reports of problems at around 9am on Tuesday.
Many frustrated Outlook users have also taken to Twitter to discuss the outage.
One user wrote: ‘Nearly throwing my laptop out the window before realising that Outlook emails are down.’
Another tweeted: ‘Service has been down for more than three hours and almost all our mailboxes. This is incredibly bad.’
And one vented: ‘Come on Microsoft. This should not be allowed to happen. Our whole company is crippled without the use of email and it’s been down for hours. Where the back up plan!?!? #Ridiculous.’
These outages appear to be unrelated to an issue at web infrastructure firm Cloudflare.
A major outage at Cloudflare caused hundreds of websites across the internet to stop working and return a ‘500 Internal Server error’ message this morning.
A content delivery network (CDN) is a distributed group of severs around the world that work in unison. Websites use these CDNs to deliver content from the cloud safely and as quickly as possible.
Cloudflare is the most popular content delivery network by some margin.
A major outage at Cloudflare caused hundreds of websites across the internet to stop working and return a ‘500 Internal Server error’ message this morning
Websites affected by the outage from around 07:34 BST this morning included Discord, Shopify, Fitbit, Peloton, Grindr, Ring, bet365, Google, NordVPN, JustEat and Ladbrokes, according to Downdetector, which monitors website outages.
Cloudflare acknowledged the issue in an update on its official Twitter account.
‘The Cloudflare team is aware of the current service issues and is working to resolve as quickly as possible,’ it stated.
The company implemented a fix at 08.20 BST and posted an update on its service status page at 09:06 BST claiming to have resolved the issue.
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