The US, Israel and many other countries are planning on relying heavily on Zoom for all or part of children’s schooling starting in early September.
By YONAH JEREMY BOBEric Yuan, CEO of Zoom Video Communications(photo credit: REUTERS/CARLO ALLEGRI)
Has Zoom, the videoconferencing service that has shot up in use and popularity in the age of novel coronavirus and social distancing, been hacked only a week before school is due to restart in a variety of countries across the globe?At 5:51 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time on Tuesday, Zoom issued a message, saying: “We have received reports of users being unable to start and join Zoom Meetings and Webinars. We are currently investigating and will provide updates as we have them. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience. Please follow status.zoom.us.”At 6:50 a.m. PDT, Zoom updated users, noting: “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.”At 7:58 a.m. PDT, Zoom issued another update, stating: “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.”The US, Israel and many other countries plan to rely on Zoom for all or part of children’s schooling starting in early September.Zoom has not revealed if it was hacked or what caused the disruption of service. It was unclear when the service disruption would be completely resolved.The Jerusalem Post first noted the disruption when a planned video conference on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty by the Arms Control Association had to be postponed because of the global outage.This is a developing story.
