04/18/2025

Zoom’s Response to its Outage is the One Thing No Company Should Do

It focused on the impact to itself rather than its customers

On Thursday, Zoom experienced an outage that affected thousands of customers. While it's not exactly clear how many customers were affected, at the peak of the outage, there were more than 50,000 reports on Downdetector. According to Zoom, the outage was due to what it called a “server block.” Here’s the official explanation:

"On April 16, between 2:25 p.m. ET and 4:12 p.m. ET, the domain zoom.us was not available due to a server block by GoDaddy Registry. This block was the result of a communication error between Zoom’s domain registrar, Markmonitor, and GoDaddy Registry, which resulted in GoDaddy Registry mistakenly shutting down zoom.us domain. Zoom, Markmonitor and GoDaddy worked quickly to identify and remove the block, which restored service to the domain zoom.us. There was no product, security, or network failure at Zoom during the outage. GoDaddy and Markmonitor are working together to prevent this from happening again."

On the one hand, it's probably a net good that the outage wasn't caused by some kind of attack or security problem. That's an important piece of information for people to know, especially if you depend on Zoom and its many features that do things like record and transcribe your meetings. A security failure would be the worst-case scenario.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Inc.