A five-hour disruption raises hackles and questions about contingency planning for technical problems in the age of social distancing. Said one university administrator, “2020 is a year of whatever can go wrong, has.”
Zoom went down Monday morning — the first day of classes at many colleges across the country.
News of the outage of the popular web conference platform made the rounds on Twitter, among both frustrated students and faculty members. The platform is one of the most widely used for synchronous online courses, which is the main mode of instruction for many institutions this fall due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The frenzy over the disruption lasted only about five hours. The outage was first reported on Zoom’s website at 8:51 a.m. Eastern time. By 1:10 p.m., the issue was resolved.
Still, some faculty canceled classes because of the outage or switched to different platforms
A company spokesperson did not explain what caused the outage, but provided the following statement: “We have resolved an issue that caused some users to be unable to start and join Zoom Meetings and Webinars or manage aspects of their account on the Zoom website. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience.”