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Frankly, there’s really only one app you can associate with the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic: Zoom. Whether it was for distance learning, work meetings, or even awkward virtual birthday parties, the communications platform quickly became the hero we never expected during lockdown life. The tool’s fame didn’t end when the lockdown came to a close. While it might not have as big an audience as it did during the peak of the pandemic, Zoom is still widely used, competing with the likes of Microsoft Teams and Google Meet.

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Like with any tool as big as Zoom, small hiccups causing technical difficulties are no surprise, and they happen every now and then. Today is an entirely different story, though. Zoom users around the world are reporting widespread issues with the platform. At the time of writing, a leading outage-monitoring platform, DownDetector, logged 67,906 reports at its peak around 3:04 p.m. EST. DownDetector also categorizes the most reported problems as Website, App, and Login issues, with 46%, 36%, and 18% of users affected in each category, respectively.

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A few users on X, formerly known as Twitter, are allegedly saying that a hacker group, Dark Storm, is behind this outage and has launched a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack on the communications platform. The group shared a post on X at 3:18 p.m. EST, claiming that “all Zoom servers [were] taken down.”

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all zoom servers taken down

— Dark Storm Team (@EssamGgggg) April 16, 2025

While the timing of the post does line up with when DownDetector reported the most complaints, there’s currently no confirmation that this is true. If you’re unaware, a DDoS is essentially a type of cyberattack where hackers overwhelm a server or network by driving an enormous amount of traffic to it until it crashes completely. This type of attack is typically done to take down websites or services. Once Zoom caught wind of the outage, it updated its Status page, changing the status of Zoom Meetings from “Operational” to “Partial Outage.” Since then, the company has also added a “Issue with multiple Zoom services” webpage, where it’s been posting periodic updates about the platform’s status. According to the page, domain name resolution issues on the zoom.us domain are affecting multiple services, and the team is currently investigating.

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We are experiencing an outage that is impacting some users, but a restore is underway.

— Zoom (@Zoom) April 16, 2025

At the time of writing, the most recent update posted at 4:16 p.m. EST reads: “We continue to investigate the domain name resolution issues on the zoom.us domain that is affecting multiple services. More updates to follow.” According to reports, before posting this update, Zoom briefly shared another note saying services were starting to recover, but quickly deleted it within a couple of minutes. Reports on DownDetector have started to decline, indicating that services may be returning to normal soon. While that’s definitely good news, it unfortunately means you probably won’t be getting that few hours off your remote job you were secretly hoping for.