Zoom Is Down Around the World, Outage Means Video Conferences Go Dark

Zoom is down in parts of the world, according to many users on Facebook and Twitter. It is still working for some people though, and the company is reportedly investigating so it might be back up soon as well. Users on social media have been celebrating that Zoom is down since it's become the de-facto way for many of us to go to work or get to class.

According to reports, the problems began at around 5.30pm on Monday, and Zoom's status page is displaying a partial outage for Zoom Meetings and Zoom Webinars. Other features like Zoom chat, and Zoom Phone are however still operational, according to the status check site.

DownDetector, which tracks web platform outages, also confirmed that there has been a big spike in problems since 5.30pm IST, with most problems being reported with logging into Zoom.

zoom is down WORLDWIDE!!!! we really won yall lmaoooooo pic.twitter.com/7lGSJEKOW5

Zoom shot from a small service to the lifeline of people in the pandemic as COVID-19 spread. Although Zoom may be one of the biggest beneficiaries of coronavirus, many people have also come to associate zoom with excessive oversight, and bring forced to participate in endless video calls, so it's no surprise that if you search for Zoom on Twitter, you get a lot of people that are celebrating.

Zoom being offline will of course create problems for a lot of people, like this user who tweeted about not knowing what to do for school now that the app is down. To make matters more complicated, the app is working for some users — a fact that some schools are tweeting, telling students that “teachers are anxious to see all our students”.

While Zoom is investigating the outages, the good news for people that need to get some work done through video-conferencing is that there are plenty of good, free alternatives that you can use right now, until Zoom gets back to normal.

Should the government explain why Chinese apps were banned? We discussed this on Orbital, our weekly technology podcast, which you can subscribe to via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or RSS, download the episode, or just hit the play button below.