Popular video calling software Zoom appeared to be suffering connectivity issues today across the U.S. and Europe, according to user reports.
A status page that provides real-time feedback about problems with the conferencing tool confirmed that meetings and video webinars were facing partial outages, backing up a surge of complaints that swept across social media platforms today.
"We have received reports of users being unable to visit the Zoom website (zoom.us) and unable to start and join Zoom Meetings and Webinars," the company said. "We are currently investigating and will provide updates as we have them."
The exact cause of the outage was unclear, but Zoom later said on the status page that its internal team was "continuing to work on a fix for this issue."
Roughly one hour after the outage were first logged, Zoom released an update saying that the identified connection issue had caused users to be "unable to authenticate to the Zoom website" and reiterated it was working to resolve the downtime.
"We are in the process of deploying a fix across our cloud. Service has been restored already for some users. We are continuing to roll this out to complete the fix for any users still impacted," the video app giant's most-recent status update read.
If you're having trouble connecting to Zoom, we have identified the issue and are working on a fix. Please follow https://t.co/aqz5nSoQRw for updates. We're so sorry about the inconvenience.
— Zoom (@zoom_us) August 24, 2020
DownDetector, a website that tracks website problems based on such user reports, said today it had recorded a sharp spike in issues, the majority of which appears to be linked to log-ins. A real-time outage map showed the U.S. east coast was worst hit.
Impacted users quickly took to Twitter to voice their frustration with the software that has enjoyed an increase in usage due to the coronavirus crisis. With lockdowns in place, many in the U.S. have come to rely on the app for education and socializing.
"Nothing like a Zoom shutdown to start the day. Prayers go out to the schools that start class today," one Twitter user noted. Another user wrote: "First class: Zoom is down and I'm in a Google Meet with my teacher and nobody else and it's really awkward."
Zoom has been contacted for comment by Newsweek.
This article was updated with additional comments from Zoom's status page.
