Zoom Conferences, Including Church Services, Disrupted by Outages

Zoom, an essential video conferencing tool that many people have been using during the coronavirus pandemic, said on Sunday that it was investigating the cause of outages that affected the ability of some users to host and join meetings. The company said the problems seemingly affected a limited number of users.

According to Fox Business, the outages affected some U.S. churches. Some migrated to YouTube or Facebook while others rescheduled services. “Also Zoom issues meant British government officials were not able to take live questions from journalists during their daily press briefing and had to resort to reading out written questions off a screen,” said the news report.

The problems reportedly peaked at 5 a.m. Eastern Time, with another around noon.

“Zoom users impacted by an issue hosting and joining Zoom meetings and Zoom video webinars should now be able to host, join and participate in these sessions,” the company said on Sunday afternoon. “We are continuing to assess this matter that impacted a subset of our users and will monitor to ensure no further operational impact.”

Rev. Emmy Kegler of Grace Lutheran Church was among the pastors whose services were disrupted. “It was a bummer and it’s reflective of the reality we’re living in now — deeply dependent on tech,” Kegler said. The near-complete “transition to tech has opened up a lot of accessibility,” she said, “but also creates new hurdles. It’s a constant improvisation process.”

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