Recently Zoom, a popular, cloud-based communications platform used for online meetings and video conferencing, experienced an outage that impacted tens of thousands of users worldwide. The issue began shortly after 8:00 am PDT on Thursday, September 15, 2022, when users reported that they could not log in or join meetings. At 8:17 PDT, the company posted the following message on their incident status page:

“We are investigating reports of zoom.us being unavailable.

Our teams are currently investigating the service-impacting event. Our engineers are investigating.”

By 8:30 PDT, the company’s engineers had identified the issue, and the company updated the incident status page with the following:

“We have identified the issue starting and joining meetings. We will continue to investigate and provide updates as we have them.”

By 8:37 PDT, the interruption appeared resolved as the company moved to monitor the situation. Zoom posted the following update:

“We have resolved the issue causing users to be unable to start and join Zoom Meetings. We will continue to monitor and provide updates as we have them.”

Then, at 8:49 PDT, Zoom’s engineers were confident that the issue would not recur and formally closed the incident.

Zoom did not release any technical details as to what caused the outage. In any case, if you are a Zoom user and could not log in for a time yesterday morning, this was the reason.

This severe but quickly resolved issue serves as a reminder that any company is susceptible to outages. Therefore, it is crucial to have different technology avenues to switch to your backup option when a similar outage occurs without losing time in your day.