Zoom was down for many – here’s everything we know about the video calling platform’s outage

Zoom sheds light on what caused today’s outage

Zoom is now sharing a bit more on what caused the popular video calling platform’s outage earlier today. You can read the entire statement below, posted on Zoom’s status page under the past incidents heading, but it all revolves around a server block from GoDaddy Registrar.

Evidently, there was a communication error between the domain registrar, Markmonitor, and the GoDaddy Registrar, which caused issues on the “zoom.us” site and prevented many of Zoom’s core features from functioning.

The three worked together to fix the issue, and Zoom says that “there was no product, security, or network failure” during today’s outage.

“Resolved – On April 16, between 2:25 P.M. ET and 4:12 P.M. ET, the domain zoom.us was not available due to a server block by GoDaddy Registry. This block was the result of a communication error between Zoom’s domain registrar, Markmonitor, and GoDaddy Registry, which resulted in GoDaddy Registry mistakenly shutting down zoom.us domain.

Zoom, Markmonitor and GoDaddy worked quickly to identify and remove the block, which restored service to the domain zoom.us. There was no product, security or network failure at Zoom during the outage. GoDaddy and Markmonitor are working together to prevent this from happening again.

Apr 16, 17:31 PDT”

Zoom has posted to X (formerly Twitter), relaying that the platform’s services have been restored. However, we still don’t have details on what caused the platform and its many features to go down.

It also happened several hours after Spotify’s global outage, but there are no signs that these are related to one another as of yet. It’s just frustration for users when things go down.

Zoom says the problems are fixed

Just after we made a successful call on the platform, and as reported outages on Down Detector are dropping, Zoom has updated its status page at 4:55 PM ET to read:

“Services have been restored, if you are still having connection issues please flush your DNS cache and attempt to reconnect.”

That’s great news after a close-to-two-hour outage. Zoom says it’s still “Monitoring” the issues and is sharing instructions for flushing DNS cache on Mac and Windows computers.

For Windows open a command prompt and type “ipconfig /flushdns”

For Mac open a terminal window and type “sudo dscacheutil -flushcache; sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder”

While Zoom’s status page still shows partial outages for a number of the platform’s features, I was just able to take a quick Zoom call with video with my colleague Lance Ulanoff.

Further, we could see and hear each other as normal. So this likely means the platform is starting to recover, and reports on Down Detector are beginning to drop now sitting at 9,345 as of 4:27 PM ET.

Along with not being able to start or join Zoom meetings, the platform’s status page appears to be down as well … at least for some.

The most recent update from Zoom came at 4:16 PM ET and reads:

“Identified – We continue to investigate the domain name resolution issues on the zoom.us domain that is affecting multiple services. More updates to follow.”

People at least seem to be having some fun commenting on the outage. Many are also commenting on switching back to in-person meetings, or that it’s essentially time for folks working remotely to take a break.

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Zoom is investigating the outage hitting its platform

Some good news on the path to resolving this outage is that Zoom has acknowledged the issues it is facing right now.

At 3:17 PM ET, Zoom said it was starting to investigate some issues across its services, and at 3:51 PM ET, the service posted:

“We continue to investigate the domain name resolution issues on the zoom.us domain that is affecting multiple services. More updates to follow.”

Seemingly, Zoom is still trying to determine what caused the issue. Once it is identified, hopefully, this will move into the resolution phase and ultimately bring the video calling service back online.

It’s also worth noting this outage is not just limited to one specific region or country, like the United States or the United Kingdom, but this is a global outage according to Zoom’s service status page.

While a Zoom outage does spell trouble for connecting with colleagues or taking meetings, folks who have encountered issues with the platform are at least having some fun with GIFs on social media.

With the Zoom app on macOS, I am able to open it, but I can’t sign in to the platform.

Similarly, my colleague Lance Ulanoff – TechRadar’s Editor-at-Large – is stuck in a similar loop of being able to enter an email and password but then not receiving a verification code to actually log in to the service.

While reports on Down Detector are starting to slow down a bit, there are still over 50,000 reports of Zoom not working on the platform, and the status page is still showing at least ‘partial outages’ for a few core services.