Zoom video calling service appears to be experiencing a major global outage, leaving thousands of users around the world unable to join conferences.
The problems started around 15:17 GMT (10.17 EST) and are ongoing, according to Downdetector, which monitors the website outage.
Users in the US and UK reported that they were unable to join or start conferences via the website or app.
company Service Status Page It reports “performance degradation” to users of its web portal.
We have received reports of a subset of users being unable to access the Zoom Web Portal. We are currently investigating and will provide updates as we get them, reads a note on the site posted at 15:38 GMT (10:38 EST).
Another update posted at 15.59 GMT states: “We have resolved an issue that caused a subset of users to not be able to access the Zoom Web portal. We will continue to monitor and provide updates as we have them.”
The outage comes as millions of Britons have been forced to work from their homes due to national rail strikes.
Zoom video calling service appears to be experiencing a major global outage, leaving thousands of users around the world unable to join conferences
Downdetector UK tweeted the news that Zoom was having problems via its official Twitter account
The problems started around 15:17 GMT and are ongoing, according to Downdetector, which monitors the site’s outage.
Thousands in the UK claim they are unable to join or start conferences via the website or app.
The US also appears to have problems, with New York, Chicago, Washington and Boston highlighted as hotspots on the Downdetector map.
The numbers are much higher in the US, with more than 13,500 reports on issues
Zoom users in both the UK and US have taken to Twitter to express their frustration (and in some cases their happiness) over the outage.
One user wrote: “Zoom has been reduced, frankly we should take a day off.”
“What a great way to start my morning at work, zooming in,” wrote a US-based user with an image of an inverted smiley face.
Another wrote: “Zooping in just in time for 9:00 am staff meetings is in the mood.”
However, the joy was evident in some of the messages posted on the social network.
One user wrote: “Shrinking a photo on a day when you’re having a meeting is the closest an adult can get to a snowy day again.”
Zoom users in both the UK and US have taken to Twitter to express their frustration (and in some cases joy) over the outage.
It’s not clear what’s causing the problem, and whether it’s related to other large-scale internet outages affecting websites and services including Outlook and Cloudflare – the content delivery network on which much of the Internet depends.
The Microsoft Outlook email platform experienced a service issue this afternoon that made it inaccessible to some users.
The company confirmed the issue and said it was working on it, with no other services currently affected.
According to the Microsoft Service Status website, some Outlook users may be unable to access their mailboxes via any communication method and may experience “delays in sending, receiving, or accessing email messages”.
The Microsoft Outlook email platform experienced service issues which made it inaccessible to some users
According to the website monitoring service Down Detector, affected users see messages telling them they are unable to connect to the server, and are struggling to connect to the service across a range of devices.
In a statement on the site, Microsoft said: “We are continuing to analyze Service Monitoring Service traceability to determine next troubleshooting steps to mitigate the impact.”
The company added that the problem concerns some users in Europe.
Microsoft said in an update: “We have determined that our traffic management infrastructure is not working as expected.
We’ve been successful in directing traffic to an alternative way to manage traffic, and we’ve been seeing an improvement in service availability since this process was completed.
“We are continuing to monitor the availability of the service as it improves, while we identify the root cause.”
According to Down Detector, affected users are seeing messages telling them they are unable to connect to the server, and are struggling to connect to the service across a range of devices.
The monitoring service showed it began receiving reports of problems around 9 a.m. on Tuesday.
Many frustrated Outlook users also took to Twitter to discuss the outage.
One user wrote: “You almost threw your laptop out of the window before you realized Outlook emails were broken.”
Another tweet: “Service is down for over three hours and almost all of our mailboxes are down. This is very bad.
Someone exhaled: ‘Come to Microsoft. This should not be allowed to happen. Our entire company is paralyzed without email and has been down for hours. Where’s the backup plan!?!? #silly.’
These outages appear to be unrelated to an issue with web infrastructure company Cloudflare.
Many frustrated Outlook users also took to Twitter to discuss today’s outage
A massive Cloudflare outage caused hundreds of websites online to stop working and return a “500 Internal Server Error” message this morning.
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a distributed group of servers around the world that work in unison. Websites use these CDNs to deliver content from the cloud as securely and as quickly as possible.
Cloudflare is the most popular content delivery network by some margins.
Massive Cloudflare outage caused hundreds of online websites to stop working and return a ‘500 Internal Server Error’ message this morning
Websites affected by the outage from about 07:34 GMT this morning included Discord, Shopify, Fitbit, Peloton, Grindr, Ring, bet365, Google, NordVPN, JustEat and Ladbrokes, according to Downdetector, which monitors website outages.
Cloudflare acknowledged the problem in an update on its official Twitter account.
“The Cloudflare team is aware of current service issues and is working to resolve them as quickly as possible,” she stated.
The company implemented a fix at 08.20 BST and posted an update on its Service Status page at 09:06 BST claiming to have fixed the issue.
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