
Zoom Partial Outages - surfingninjas
https://status.zoom.us/
======
gonzo41
Cut em some slack, they've been holding the world together with sticky tape
for about 9 months now.

~~~
Cthulhu_
I was impressed at how well they were able to scale up when the 'rona hit. I'd
still like to know how Zoom specifically rose up so fast, given that it's one
of a billion video conferencing tools. Was it because they offered many-to-
many video chats of over whatever Skype offers for free? I don't even know
what Zoom's business model is.

~~~
hosh
In the last startup I joined, back in ‘16, they had two things going for them:

    
    
      - It was very easy to get people to get on the same zoom call as everyone else
      - It had the best quality for video conferencing. 
    

At the time, Hangouts was unreliable. Slack had not had a video chat feature
(and it was crappy when it first came out). Goto Meeting had poor quality
video and was more difficult to get everyone together.

We also thought that Zoom had encryption. (Turns out ...). There were very
easy screen shares.

The startup I joined is remote-first, though it did not start that way. After
I joined from out of state, we just all started doing that. We used Zoom a
lot.

In short, I think Zoom got as big as they did because they addressed enough of
the pain points in the end user experience.

~~~
MR4D
I would also add that Skype blew it. This should have been their market.

Today, I don’t even have skype installed anywhere.

~~~
qppo
That's more of a story of Microsoft acquiring and destroying a brand. They
took the consumer software and rebranded their enterprise communications suite
under it, then rebranded that and now no one "skypes" anyone anymore.

Microsoft originally had a product suite called Lync which had chat and
calling. It was pretty good. Then MS rebranded it as "Skype for Business." It
was the same infrastructure and program with a facelift to use Skype's
styling. That did not work out well, and was rebranded as Microsoft teams.

I'd suspect the whole point of acquiring Skype was to move it to enterprise,
which it only did cosmetically and turned out to be a failure. MS Teams is
alive and well though.

------
nathanyz
Our school district's entire eLearning plan relies on Zoom for full day live
streaming. Basically every teacher of every class live streaming all day. Not
sure how many other districts and colleges had similar plans.

~~~
germinalphrase
K-12?

Are they expecting students to “sit in class” by watching a live zoom lecture?

~~~
darcyparker
I have a child starting kindergarten. 1/2 the class is attending in person M
and Tu and the other 1/2 is via a chrome book and Google Meet. Wed all kids
are attending via Google Meet (the classroom will be deep cleaned Wed). And
then Th/Fr is like M/T, but the group that was in person is now at home and
vice versa. Then they deep clean again on the weekend. (Their day is 6 hrs
(less recess and lunch)).

Not only is it going to be challenging for the kindergarten kids to stay
focused on their class via chrome book, the SAME teacher is managing the kids
in the classroom and the kids online. The kindergarten teachers each have an
assistant too (as they did before Covid-19) so that helps a bit.

I am fortunate my wife stays at home with the kids. I can't imagine what it
will be like for parents of kindergartners who both work, or parents with
special needs kids or parents who don't speak English. I am supportive of
social distancing in these times. But its going to be tough on the kids.

~~~
bcrosby95
Our school started with 3 hours straight (with 10 minute breaks) infront of
the screen for our Kindergartner. That quickly changed. I think families even
with a stay at home parent will have an incredibly difficult time keeping a 5
year old online and infront of a screen for a total of 5 hours per day. Even 2
hours straight with a 10 minute break is not easy.

------
AlphaWeaver
There's a workaround available for this issue.

This issue only affects joining Zoom meetings through the web client. If you
join using the desktop or mobile client to the meeting ID directly, you should
still be able to join a meeting.

~~~
aantix
Does that affect when you click on a link in a meeting invite, it opens on
Zoom's site, then opens the app?

~~~
AlphaWeaver
This flow (clicking on a link, opening on their website, and opening the app)
is what's currently broken. Opening in the app directly bypasses the problem
for this reason.

------
Scoundreller
When everyone started working from home, Rogers in Toronto (1 of the 2
cellular networks) basically crashed on the voice side.

It was painful to get them to admit anything was wrong, until I asked if this
would impact 9-1-1 calls too, then they admitted an issue with full-digit
dialing (aka: 10 digit dialing).

Even units that were resistant to switching from the conference line migrated
over.

I wonder how this afternoon will go if this continues.

------
Scoundreller
Workaround: if you have the app and manually enter the meeting number and
password, it works.

But hyperlinks are not.

------
glenstein
Originally the Zoom site listed meetings and webinars as operational _during_
the time the outage was happening. Now they are listed as 'Partial Outage.' I
would have thought something like an outage is detected automatically and the
status page updated automatically.

And the error message is strange:

>There is no accout for zuora account id:2c92a00d6ff0e970016ffbde74ae767c
(3,201)

It seems that everyone having issues is seeing the same error.

~~~
tekstar
[https://www.zuora.com](https://www.zuora.com)

Zuora seems to be a bit like Stripe? Maybe it's their outage, or maybe someone
at Zoom forgot to pay the Zuora bill..

~~~
jaredwiener
They even have a whole Zoom case study! [https://www.zuora.com/our-
customers/case-studies/zoom/](https://www.zuora.com/our-customers/case-
studies/zoom/)

------
jiripospisil
Before the whole virus situation started, I had never even heard of Zoom, and
now it seems it's everywhere. What happened to Skype? I remember it being the
thing I was forced to use during pretty much every client meeting back in the
day.

~~~
freeone3000
Skype has been replaced by Teams.

~~~
el-salvador
Skype for Business is being replaced by Teams. Normal Skype still exists.

~~~
freeone3000
Huh? Why? For who?

~~~
el-salvador
[https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/faq-
journey](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/faq-journey)

------
dom96
Shouldn't universities and other organisations plan for outages like this and
prepare an alternative to Zoom for precisely these sorts of occurrences?

~~~
justinlink
For many schools, zoom is the backup plan. Covid caused the in-person outage.

This isn't their area of expertise, and asking teachers to migrate to the
backup and inform and assist their students to get online during an outage of
unknown length isn't reasonable.

Snow days in 2020 will be replaced with Zoom Outage days.

~~~
jjk166
If Zoom had an outage in early april, that would be legitimate. However it's
been 5 months since schools first closed, and we've known for most of that
time that this would be a long term issue. Do you really want the person who
can't figure out two meeting programs over the course of several months to be
responsible for your kid's education?

------
markstos
World largely standardizes on a single company's platform for online meetings.
What could go wrong?

~~~
abc-xyz
Not to mention said company have previously been caught installing malware on
people’s computer[1], lied about encryption[2], censored US citizens on behalf
of Beijing[3] just to name a few incidents.

And to make matters worse, 99+% of the Zoom meetings could easily take place
on Jitsi Meet, Teams, etc.

[1]:
[https://mobile.twitter.com/c1truz_/status/124473767293082419...](https://mobile.twitter.com/c1truz_/status/1244737672930824193)

[2]: [https://theintercept.com/2020/03/31/zoom-meeting-
encryption/](https://theintercept.com/2020/03/31/zoom-meeting-encryption/)

[3]: [https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/zoom-cites-
chine...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/zoom-cites-chinese-law-
to-defend-censorship-of-human-rights-activists/)

------
nickthegreek
Looks like all calendar links and direct urls are broke at our org, but we can
get in via the app by typing in the meeting id. what a mess!

------
kmfrk
If you're a bigger university, some kind of fallback plan seems to be the
responsible thing to do, but what would that look like? Surely someone's been
working towards that for the past months.

~~~
humanistbot
Zoom was the fallback plan. There hasn't been enough time and resources to get
everything set up with even one monolithic infrastructure provider. Faculty
and staff at universities have been working overtime over the summer to adapt
in-person classes, learn new systems that keep changing, and get new students'
accounts set up and secure, all while doing it at home -- often without
childcare.

------
Balgair
Seems like the crush of schools starting this morning was related to this.

I guess Eternal September came early to Zoom this year.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September)

------
kop316
I can confirm that SSO is broken for many browsers. I had to install the app
to get it working.

Later on, i will be making a VM for Zoom explicitly.

~~~
GnarfGnarf
What is "SSO"? Single sign-on?

~~~
maurys
Yes. That's how you login with Google, LinkedIn or your enterprise account.

------
rosstex
The CEO of Zoom spoke at SIGCOMM a couple weeks ago (unfortunately I don't
think there will be a recording)

------
QuesnayJr
I had to give an online exam today. Mercifully it was not on Zoom -- I think
the stress would have killed me.

------
logicprog
This is happening to me right now lol. It's funny seeing it on HN.

------
colesantiago
Has there ever been a video service that _hasn 't_ gone down? This really
concerns me if this is the future of a remote world.

~~~
briandear
Not sure FaceTime has had any significant outages as long as I can remember.

------
svarlamov
For CS teachers working through the outage,
[https://codingrooms.com/](https://codingrooms.com/) is providing a virtual
classroom for teaching programming that offers conferencing separate to Zoom
as a backup

