Zoom outages affected COVID-19 government briefing and even church services
Yesterday video conferencing app Zoom was suffering outages that affected thousands of people, especially in the UK.
According to The Guardian, a daily Zoom conference hosted by government officials, where members of the press are able to ask questions about the coronavirus was also cut short due to the outages. While journalists normally ask questions live inside the video meeting, yesterday, on May 17th, they would have to submit written questions instead, to be read by business secretary Aloh Sharma, who is hosting the briefings.
Hours after the initial outage reports, Zoom tweeted that impacted users should now be able to host, join and participate in Zoom Meetings and Video Webinars if they restart their sessions, with its support team continuing to monitor the situation.
In the US and UK, the Zoom outages also interrupted Sunday church services, with The Guardian quoting a tweet by Bury St Edmunds vicar Rev Simon Harvey saying "Imagine if door locks in churches across the country jammed simultaneously on a Sunday morning."
For being a fairly new company, Zoom's meteoric rise now means that its services are, and will continue to be of vital importance to both businesses and government officials, in addition to regular users.
The company first showed its growth may be happening too fast for it to handle when piling security concerns caused usage of the Zoom app to be banned in the US Senate, businesses such as Google and SpaceX, and public schools in New York.
In an effort to improve user trust after the bans started, last month Zoom announced a 90-day security plan, alongside the company's new security advisory council.
Soon after, in order to meet its increasing usage demands, Zoom began using Oracle Cloud for its cloud services, and is said to be transferring more than 7 petabytes of data through them daily. In addition to Oracle, Zoom also uses Amazon Web Services as a cloud provider, as well as other undisclosed public cloud infrastructures.
According to The Guardian, a daily Zoom conference hosted by government officials, where members of the press are able to ask questions about the coronavirus was also cut short due to the outages. While journalists normally ask questions live inside the video meeting, yesterday, on May 17th, they would have to submit written questions instead, to be read by business secretary Aloh Sharma, who is hosting the briefings.
Zoom users impacted by this issue should now be able to host, join & participate in Zoom Meetings & Zoom Video Webinars if they restart their sessions. We continue to assess & monitor. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused.
— Zoom (@zoom_us) May 17, 2020
For being a fairly new company, Zoom's meteoric rise now means that its services are, and will continue to be of vital importance to both businesses and government officials, in addition to regular users.
The company first showed its growth may be happening too fast for it to handle when piling security concerns caused usage of the Zoom app to be banned in the US Senate, businesses such as Google and SpaceX, and public schools in New York.
Soon after, in order to meet its increasing usage demands, Zoom began using Oracle Cloud for its cloud services, and is said to be transferring more than 7 petabytes of data through them daily. In addition to Oracle, Zoom also uses Amazon Web Services as a cloud provider, as well as other undisclosed public cloud infrastructures.
FCC OKs Cingular\'s purchase of AT&T Wireless
Things that are NOT allowed: