Zoom down: Video call app breaks in the middle of the working day

Zoom meetings may ‘narrow cognitive focus’, study finds (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Zoom, the video call app, has broken in the middle of the working day.

Users said they were unable to get into meetings, likely leaving many remote offices struggling to work. The outage came at the beginning of the working day in the US, and as it came to a close in the UK – both key times for meetings.

Zoom – once a relatively obscure video conferencing app – saw a huge increase in users as the world shifted towards working from home. It could see even more than usual this week, amid UK rail strikes and other issues keeping people working at home.

Zoom’s status website said specifically that its web portal was seeing degraded performance, and that it applied only to a “subset of users”. But users across the world reported problems getting into meetings and using other parts of the online system.

The company said it was “investigating” the issue.

The problems came on a busy day for internet outages. Early on Tuesday, a Cloudflare issue took many of the world’s biggest websites offline for an hour; shortly after, Outlook was hit by a major outage that left people unable to see their emails.