Video-conferencing company Zoom Video Communications Inc said on Monday a partial outage had left numerous U.S. users unable to log in to work meetings or attend classes remotely, but that it had managed to restore some service.
The San Jose, California-based company has experienced a surge in usage during the coronavirus pandemic, as millions of people turn to it for work meetings, school, social events including weddings and to otherwise stay connected while isolating themselves.
Outage tracking website Downdetector.com showed nearly 7,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Zoom around midday, down from more than 15,000 a couple of hours earlier.
“We are in the process of deploying a fix across our cloud. Service has been restored already for some users. We are continuing to roll this out to complete the fix for any users still impacted,” Zoom said on its website.
The company said earlier it had “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.”
Zoom’s stock has risen more than eight-fold since its initial public offering last year and four-fold so far in 2020, but it fell as much as 5.4% in early Monday.
Zoom competes with Cisco Systems Inc’s Webex, Microsoft Corp’s Teams and Alphabet Inc’s Google Meet platform for paying customers, particularly enterprises, while offering a free version to customers.
Zoom had 300 million daily meeting participants in April, the latest figures disclosed.
Even as its usage has soared, Zoom has come under fire over privacy and security issues, including incidents of “Zoom bombing” in which uninvited users entered and disrupted meetings. It has since rolled out major upgrades, including end-to-end encryption for video calls.
Although a California company, Zoom has big research and development centers in China with hundreds of employees, according to a filing it made to the U.S. government.
“For sustained growth to continue, it (Zoom) will have to show investors that it can be relied on to ensure its core customers don’t drift towards the likes of Microsoft Teams, Google Meet and Cisco’s Webex,” said Susannah Streeter, senior investment and markets commentator at Hargreaves Lansdown.
“As Zoom fatigue sets in and the pandemic eases, it’s even more important that the company demonstrates its systems are secure, if it’s to be seen as a long-term player in this competitive market,” Streeter added.
Users took to Twitter to complain about the outage.
“Zoom having a world wide outage for the first day of school, so 2020!” Twitter user Anthony Slaughter wrote.
Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor
Comments
0 comment