What you need to know
- Popular video-conferencing app Zoom is down right now.
- There has been a spike in reported problems on Downdetector.
- Reddit also appears to be experiencing issues.
Several reports are emerging suggesting that video-conferencing tool Zoom is experiencing networking difficulties and a possible outage.
The outage was picked up on Twitter by one customer who noted users getting kicked out of calls, and a spike on Downdetector. Several other users have responded in kind. Zoom's status dashboard now reports that it's aware of the outage.
@zoom_us Are there issues with Zoom this morning? My users are getting kicked out and Downdetector is starting to see problems.@zoom_us Are there issues with Zoom this morning? My users are getting kicked out and Downdetector is starting to see problems.— John Lee (@johnhlee) May 13, 2020May 13, 2020
In the last few minutes, reports of issues on Downdector have spiked sharply to over a thousand around 30 minutes ago. The outage map suggests the problem is most affecting the U.S., however, there are scattered reports in the UK also.
In an unrelated incident, Reddit also appears to be experiencing a mass outage, again several thousand users have reported problems with the site in the last hour, again mostly in the U.S. but also worldwide.
Zoom has previously enjoyed a meteoric rise in popularity, thanks in part to global lockdown measures which have forced more people than ever to work remotely and even socialize from home. In a blog post back in April, Zoom confirmed that it now had 300M daily meeting participants (not 300M users), up from just 10 million in December of last year. Zoom's massive growth also highlighted a number of security flaws and concerns in its platform. So much so, that Zoom vowed a 90-day freeze on new features whilst it worked to make its platform more secure, bringing on several high-profile security consultants to assist in the work.
