Zoom Goes Down For Church Service Sunday Morning

Zoom’s usage has exploded since the coronavirus pandemic forced workers across the world to work remotely, and the platform has largely held up to accommodate that large increase in traffic.

That’s why it was a bit of a surprise as the service went down for a significant length of time Sunday, affecting churches and other houses of worship that have been depending on Zoom to bring sermons to worshippers.

Church pastors starting services then realising there was a problem with #zoom pic.twitter.com/HKmzGrVklM

— Derrick Roberts (@degsyroberts) May 17, 2020

The service went down Sunday morning just after 9 a.m. ET, affecting users on the East Coast in the U.S. and the U.K.

According to The Guardian, the outage also affected a media briefing on the coronavirus pandemic in the U.K.

The platform’s technical issues affected Downing Street’s daily coronavirus briefing. Journalists are usually able to ask questions live on screen, but technical issues meant they had to submit written questions to be read out by the business secretary, Alok Sharma, who was hosting the briefing.

Zoom said the issues affected users hosting and joining meetings. By 12:15 p.m., Zoom said the issues were resolved.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, Zoom has become a household term for video conferencing of any kind, and the platform has become one of the more popular services for video calls of any kind.

Last month, the company wrote in a blog post the platform has exceeded 300 million daily users, up from just 10 million in December.

The company is learning and adapting to issues on the fly, including some well-documented security and privacy concerns. Most infamously, those issues include Zoombombing, in which hackers gain unauthorized access to a meeting and disrupt it with vulgar or obscene activity.

Zoom is embarking on a 90-day security plan to address those concerns and provide more privacy and security features.

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