Popular video calling software Zoom appears to have been suffering connectivity issues today across the U.S. and Europe. The company confirmed that meetings and video webinars are facing partial outages.
American communications technology company Zoom Video Communications Inc (NASDAQ: ZM) said on Monday it has an outage. Even though it seems to be a perfect excuse not to look at your co-workers again this became a huge problem for those who are working from home and it is expected for them who communicate all the time (news redactions, media of all sort etc).
At the time of writing, Zoom (ZM) stock was in the red. The stock was trading at $283.01 (-2.30%).
The video calling giant 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.”
Details of Zoom Outage
The outage started at 8:51 am ET, Zoom confirmed. However, it seems that not everyone is affected. Some said that their Zoom calls are working fine. Others stated they cannot get into their regularly scheduled Zoom meetings.
The fact is – this could be bad. Not only for users but for the company as well. Zoom was an early profiteer of the videoconferencing boom that grew when the COVID-19 outbreak happened. The company grew from 10 million users in December to more than 300 million daily meeting participants today. However, it seems that the platform is constantly experiencing outages this year that has disrupted its service for users.
Before the pandemic, around two-thirds of all social interactions were face-to-face. However, thanks to the rules of social distancing we still talk in person only with the people we live with and maybe with a friend or two we have allowed into our pods. There is the occasional chat with the cashier at the grocery store. However, all other things as are schools, work conversation, book clubs, dinner parties, joking around at the gym moved online since. That has left nearly all of us yearning for more social connections.
Telegram as Main Competitor Offering End-to-End Encryption
Still, Zoom is not the only one offering video call services. Just a week ago, Telegram, the messaging app that promises to focus on speed and security, introduced the video calling facility on its platform. The company that has more than 400 million users on its platform said that the video calls on Telegram support picture-in-picture mode, similar to other video content on the platform. Telegram said that the picture-in-picture mode enables users to “scroll through chats and multitask while maintaining eye contact.” The company added that the “alpha version” of the video calling facility is currently enabled on both Android and iOS.
What is also of great importance is the fact that Telegram said that the video calls on its platform are protected with end-to-end encryption.
The end-to-end encryption ensures that conversations are protected with no access to anyone including that of a company and is found on platforms like WhatsApp and Signal. And let’s not forget that in March this year, Zoom was scrutinized after a research report revealed that the app does not support end-to-end encryption even as Zoom on its website stated that it supported such a protocol. The main competitor for Telegram, WhatsApp offers both end-to-end encryption and group video calling facility.
In late April, Mozilla Foundation, the company behind the Firefox browser compared 15 popular video calling apps including FaceTime, Duo, WhatsApp and Skype on their security parameters and revealed that three of the 15 apps failed to meet its minimum security standards while other apps were found to not offer end-to-end encryption by default including Messenger app and Skype.
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