Zoom outage fixed after a good four hours of disruption

In the US, Zoom's video conferencing service has suffered a widespread outage, causing a chaos as millions of children and teachers attempt to start the school year online.

It has been seen, a spike in Zoom users reporting issues with logging in to the video conferencing service early on August 24, mainly affecting users in the eastern US and in the UK. There are currently several thousand outage or issue reports on Down Detector.

Zoom has also acknowledged the outage on its status report page. The company said: "We have received reports of users being unable to visit the Zoom website (zoom.us) and unable to start and join Zoom Meetings and Webinars. We are currently investigating and will provide updates as we have them."

Update, 9:50am ET Zoom reported: "We have identified the issue causing users to be unable to authenticate to the Zoom website (zoom.us) and unable to start and join Zoom Meetings and Webinars, and we are working on a fix for this issue."

Update, 10:27am ET Zoom reported: "We are continuing to work on a fix for this issue."

Update, 10:58 am ET Zoom says it's resolving the issue: "We are in the process of deploying a fix across our cloud. Service has been restored already for some users. We are continuing to roll this out to complete the fix for any users still impacted."

Update, 1:10pm ET Zoom says the fix is complete: "We have resolved the issue causing some users to be unable to start and join Zoom Meetings and Webinars or manage aspects of their account on the Zoom website."

Zoom was an early beneficiary of the videoconferencing boom spurred by the coronavirus pandemic - the company grew from 10 million daily meeting participants in December to more than 300 million daily meeting participants - but the platform has experienced several outages this year that has disrupted its service for users.