Zoom experienced a major global outage on Wednesday affecting a substantial chunk of its user base.
From around 2:45pm EST/7:45pm BST, Zoom’s service status page indicated “partial outages” affecting its flagship Zoom Meetings service and the ability to access Zoom's website.
Zoom has since shed light on what transpired, posted on its status page in the past incidents section.
The company says that a miscommunication between domain management services—specifically, Markmonitor and the GoDaddy Registrar—triggered a disruption affecting the "zoom.us" domain. This glitch temporarily disabled several of Zoom’s essential functionalities. The companies involved collaborated swiftly to resolve the problem. According to Zoom, the incident did not stem from any product, security, or infrastructure failure.
Zoom's statement reads:
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."
Additionally, Zoom posted on X, confirming that service had been restored.
Service has now been restored after the earlier outage, and we sincerely appreciate your patience and understanding.
— Zoom (@Zoom) April 16, 2025
During the outage, some users encountered an “Unable to Connect” error when attempting to join meetings, while others were unable to log in altogether. Compounding the disruption, the Zoom website was completely inaccessible, displaying a 502 Bad Gateway error. Even Zoom’s press contact email was temporarily nonfunctional during the incident.
More Information On What Happened
At the height of the disruption, outage tracking site Down Detector recorded over 55,000 user reports at 3:15 PM EST. At 3:17 PM EST, Zoom acknowledged it was investigating issues affecting various parts of its platform. By 3:51 PM EST, the company provided a more detailed update, stating:
"We continue to investigate the domain name resolution issues on the zoom.us domain that are affecting multiple services. More updates to follow."
Zoom resolved the issue by 4PM EST, and the number of incident reports has since substantially declined.
