Thousands of users were unexpectedly thrown out of their meetings on April 16, 2025, when Zoom, a popular video conferencing software, suffered a significant global outage.
The outage started around 3:00 PM ET, with DownDetector recording over 60,000 outage reports by 3:15 PM. Users struggled to join meetings, log into accounts, and even access Zoom's website.
Zoom first reported "partial outages" on its service status page, but the platform's key function—Zoom meetings—was virtually inaccessible for many. Reports flooded social media networks like X and Threads, where remote workers expressed their frustration and, in some cases, their happiness. "Shout out to Zoom for being down when I really didn't want to go to a 4 pm meeting," one user commented. Another joked, "Zoom is down. No more work today."
By 4 PM ET, Zoom had rectified the issue. However, the reason for the outage wasn't immediately identified. Zoom didn't offer full clarification until later that evening. The problem originated from a server block by GoDaddy Registry, which was caused by a communication fault between Zoom's domain registrar, MarkMonitor, and GoDaddy. The error led to the mistaken shutdown of the zoom.us domain, effectively cutting off access to key Zoom services.
In a statement, Zoom emphasized that there wasn't any security breach, product failure, or network intrusion. The problem was caused entirely by a miscommunication between third-party services. Zoom, MarkMonitor, and GoDaddy responded quickly to restore access, and steps are being made to avoid a repeat.
Interestingly, Zoom's downtime occurred after a separate issue with Spotify earlier in the day, although there isn't any evidence that the two events were related.
However, for remote workers all over the world, the back-to-back disruption provides an uninterrupted and, in some cases, welcome midweek break.