Emma Roth is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO.
Zoom suffered a major outage this afternoon that prevented people from connecting to video calls and accessing its website. As shown by Cisco’s ThousandEyes platform, site connectivity dropped off at around 2:40PM ET before coming back online nearly two hours later.
Users across X posted about the outage, with some getting an “Unable to Connect” error message when entering meetings, and others unable to sign in at all. The Zoom website was also completely down, as it displayed a 502 Bad Gateway error, and its press email didn’t work either.
It’s still not clear what caused the issue, but one Reddit user, u/TastesLikeOwlbear, mentioned that the Zoom.us domain may have been in a server hold. This happens when a domain is “not activated in the DNS,” according to ICANN, making it completely inaccessible due to verification, fraud, or security issues.
As noted in the Reddit post, the domain registry issue was fixed at 4:12PM ET, but it might take some time for Zoom to come back online for everyone, as DNS servers pick up and propagate the corrected information.
“Service has now been restored after the earlier outage, and we sincerely appreciate your patience and understanding,” Zoom said in a post on X at around 5PM ET.
The Verge reached out to Zoom and GoDaddy with requests for more information but didn’t immediately hear back.
Update, April 16th: Added an update from Zoom.