Coronavirus

Major Zoom Outage Marks Rough Start to College Classes

Students at Temple and Widener universities and other places reported trouble using the online meeting platform as Zoom says they're investigating the outage

NBC Universal, Inc.

Zoom was "all systems operational" Monday afternoon after the massive online meeting platform experienced a morning outage just as some colleges were set to begin fall classes.

The partial outage affected Zoom Meetings and Zoom Webinars, according to the company's status page.

"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," the company posted on the status page.

Just before 11 a.m. EDT, Zoom said it was deploying a fix to resolve the issue.

By 3:15 p.m. EDT the site showed "all systems operational."

Students at Philadelphia-area universities Temple and Widener reported issues trying to log into online classes. Temple was set to begin the fall semester Monday with a large number of courses being offered online because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Limited in-person classes will start the fall semester at Temple University on Monday as the school navigates educating students amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Not everyone is happy with the plans, however. NBC10's Miguel Martinez-Valle reports from North Philadelphia.

A spokesperson for Temple University said afternoon classes were expected to take place.

Zoom's platform is used by small businesses, large corporations, school districts and state courts among many others. Media outlets across the country reported issues at many institutions during the morning hours.

The first day of school has rolled out throughout the country over the past several weeks, a hybrid of in-person and online classes. Last year, about 21% of school districts and 14% of elementary and secondary student, began instruction during the last week in August, according to Pew Research.

Zoom Video Communications became a familiar tool to millions of new users after the spread of COVID-19 made face-to-face meetings risky. It now has about 300 million users.

The website Down Detector, which tracks online service outages, said the outage appeared to be centered in the northeast United States, but there were also reports of issues in Chicago, Texas, California and other metropolitan areas and Europe. Reports of outages declined following the morning peak.

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