Zoom goes down just in time to kick off the school year

In the United States, Mexico, and other countries, Zoom reported a “partial outage” of meetings and webinars Monday morning, just as many schools are beginning to rely on videoconferencing to reopen remotely due to the pandemic.

According to Down Detector, the outages started around 5 a.m. PT on Monday morning, just as adults and students would have been logging on for the day’s classes and meetings. The service’s status page lists Aoom phone, chat, website, and recording all as operational, so only meetings and webinars have been affected so far. However, even the partial outage has left many users affected while working and learning from home.

Users took to reporting on Twitter after their attempts to log in and join video meetings were unsuccessful. While the outage is currently being reported worldwide, many students in the United States will be hit especially hard, since schools and colleges are set to resume virtually this month.

“If you’re having trouble connecting to Zoom, we have identified the issue and are working on a fix,” the company said in a tweet. “We’re so sorry about the inconvenience.” Zoom referred customers to its status page, which as of 7:30 am PT still showed outages.

In a comment from a Zoom spokesperson to Digital Trends, the spokesperson said ” “We have received reports of users being unable to start and join Zoom Meetings and Webinars. We are currently investigating and will provide updates as we have them.  We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience.”

At 11 a.m., Zoom announced it was deploying a fix to restore service. While this restored service for some users, the outage is still affecting others. Zoom’s status page still lists partial outages for zoom meetings, webinars, and web client and portal pages.