Zoom glitches briefly grind schools to a halt

NEW YORK » Teachers and parents got a brief glimpse of a new kind of pandemicera nightmare Monday when Zoom — the videoconferencing service that powers everything from distance learning to business meetings to casual, socially distant get-togethers — abruptly went dead.

For roughly two-and-ahalf hours Monday morning, many users were unable to load the Zoom website; others could neither host nor join scheduled meetings. Zoom fixed the problem by 11:30 a.m. ET, the company reported on its status page.

The timing was less than ideal, since many schools across the U.S. were just starting online instruction after a summer surge in the coronavirus pandemic scotched many plans to reopen classes with students present in the flesh.

“Today was horrible,” said Jacqueline Donovan, a professor at Broward College in Broward County, Florida. Her 12-year-old daughter Michaela and 14-year-old son Jayden were trying to log onto Zoom classes, but unable to.

“They were both panic stricken and anxious,” she said. Meanwhile, Donovan herself was trying to hold her first class, an introduction to business, and getting frantic emails from her own students. Her class was eventually canceled.

“You become so accustomed to the software working, then (when it doesn’t) you realize how dependent

you are on the software and it’s a little scary,” she said.

Zoom did not disclose the cause of the problem, which appeared to hit both coasts of the U.S. especially hard. Its shares fell less than 3% during regular trading.

Grade schools, high schools and universities are relying on Zoom and competing technologies like Microsoft Teams to teach remotely and reduce the

chance of infection during the pandemic. Schools began opening over the past month with a wide array of in-person, hybrid and online schooling plans. In 2019, during a normal school year, about 80 percent of elementary and secondary schools had opened by the last week of August, according to Pew Research.

Internet services from Facebook to Amazon go down all the time, but few have become so crucial to companies, government and schools that their absence can spur brief moments

of panic. These days, when Zoom goes down, it’s more like a power outage or phones going dead, making it a modern sort of utility for a nation still enduring the ravages of COVID-19.

Zoom and similar services “have been elevated to what we call ‘mission critical applications,’” said technology analyst Tim Bajarin, president of consultancy Creative Strategies. “They’re no longer nice to have, they’re now must have.”

While Zoom has built up server farms and spent millions investing in its software,

it was still a relatively nascent company when the coronavirus hit in March, Bajarin said. “The bottom line is, software glitches happen.”

Bryan Grant in Crystal Lake, Illinois, had just corralled his 31/2-year old twins and 5-year-old son in front of computers to start their first days at pre-school and kindergarten. Then came an urgent message from their school, 30 minutes ahead of classes, to use Google instead.

He rushed to install the software and sign in, but the classes descended into semi

chaos as the children in the kindergarten class unmuted themselves, something they can’t do on Zoom. His fiveyear-old was nearly in tears as he tried to follow the rules and raise his hand for a question, but was talked over by other kids who unmuted themselves.

“It was very difficult to change on the fly like this, to something we’re very familiar with on Zoom, to the other Google product,” he said. “We were prepared for one thing and this completely did a 180 on all of us, it was pretty difficult today.”