Outages happen. AT&T and Microsoft are the usual culprits. However, if you use Zoom or Spotify yesterday, you definitely knew they were down for a bit. If you have my luck, you definitely needed them for something important at the time they were down. That is how it always happens to me.
Zoom suffered a major outage in the afternoon at around 2:40PM, according to The Verge. That would make it around 11:40AM on the west coast. It was down for nearly two hours before it came back online. The Zoom website was also completely down, as it displayed a 502 Bad Gateway error, and its press email didn’t work either.
While Zoom never gave any information about the issue, except for thanking people for their “patience and understanding”, a Reddit user believe he knows why. According to the piece, the user believes that the “Zoom.us domain may have been in a server hold. This happens when a domain is “not activated in the DNS,” according to ICANN, making it completely inaccessible due to verification, fraud, or security issues.”
Earlier in the day, Spotify went down across the board. Around 8:45AM ET, which is 5:45AM west coast, the company took to X to let users know that they were “aware of some issues” affecting the service and that it was “checking them out.”
Nearly two hours later, they responded to reports that they were hacked. They said that the service will be back “as soon as possible,” and that “reports of this being a security hack are false.”
There is no explanation as to what caused the outage, which means it was something internal. However, reports of the outage started in Europe and escalated quickly into the United States. The outage affected Spotify web player, desktop app, and iOS app. Some desktop users met with a black screen that refused to load entirely, while others could select songs, but not play them. Some songs were playable on iOS, but only if Spotify cached them before the outage.
Both services are up as of this writing. However, by the time you’re reading this, that could change.