Many millions of people have come to rely on video conferencing services in recent months to keep in contact with friends and family. Mostly these platforms have held up well, but today was a step too far for Zoom it seems.
As ZDNet reports, Zoom is currently down. It just so happens to be the day that millions of students are attempting to go back to school, which in a lot of cases means logging on to virtual classrooms. The result seems to be users of Zoom in the US and UK pushing the service beyond its limits.
The Zoom status page confirms an incident has occurred and an investigation is underway, "We have identified the issue causing users to be unable to authenticate to the Zoom website (zoom.us) and unable to start and join Zoom Meetings and Webinars, and we are working on a fix for this issue." That message appeared less than an hour ago at the time of writing.
It may be difficult for teachers and students to quickly switch to an alternative video streaming service, so many will simply be waiting until Zoom comes back online, or deciding to give up today and try again tomorrow. That will ultimately result in another big spike in demand tomorrow morning, but hopefully Zoom will be well prepared by then with additional server capacity on hand to cope.
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