Digital Snowday! Remote Workers and Learners Experience Zoom Crash

This is the world we live in now, with huge chunks of society relegated to the online ecosphere. Schools around the country have gone remote for the first semester and many workplaces have shifted to operating remotely since the spring. More than ever before, we live in a world of Facetime and Zoom. So when Zoom crashed for huge portions of the country on Monday, that outage united kids ready for their first day of school with remote workers everywhere in a first-of-its-kind “Digital Snowday.”
Today @zoom_us had a service disruption that affected many of our customers. We know the responsibility we have to keep your meetings, classrooms & important events running. I’m personally very sorry & we will all do our best to prevent this from happening in the future.
— Eric S. Yuan (@ericsyuan) August 24, 2020
Everyone is finding their own speed on Zoom. While we may be a little partial to the dad who dressed in different costumes to Zoom-bomb his wife’s conference calls, we’re all getting used to it at our own pace. Some are even going the extra mile to nerd out with their Zoom backgrounds. But we’ve never realized how dependent we’ve become on the video teleconferencing platform until it crashed on Monday.
This @zoom_us outage is definitely one way to get myself back into taking a full class load… #zoomdown pic.twitter.com/oo7OHUikyJ
— Conor Camazine (@conorcamazine17) August 24, 2020
Starting in the morning, the service wasn’t working for millions of users in the eastern half of the country That meant no school, no work meetings, some court proceedings were affected. It was a total mess. But, for the remote students, it’s the closest they’ll come to a snow day. Sure, they no longer have a commute and won’t see classes canceled for icy roads when that video conferencing program goes down, it’s quitting time for a large portion of the country. Service was restored to affected users by 4:00 p.m.
@zoom_us : “I’ll give you some time back this morning…” #ZoomDown pic.twitter.com/6v6i4medKN
— nick roberts (@TweetsOfNick) August 24, 2020
Thousands and thousands of meetings had to be rescheduled, and what was the first day of remote school for many kids was completely junked, but we need to look at the positives. Sure, it’s horribly frustrating to teachers already gamely giving it their all in the brave new remote learning world. But it’s also a rare occurrence (hopefully), as Monday’s outage was the first of its scope.
Zoom just went down worldwide. It is part of the new reality of virtual learning like a digital “snow day.” Of course, there is no ritual that fits. My kids would flush ice cubes down the toilet to cause snow days but flushing one’s laptop is quite expensive and difficult.
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) August 24, 2020
And we all learned a lesson from #ZoomDown. When our trusty video conferencing platforms fails us, we need a contingency plan. So next time Zoom craps out for huge swaths of the world, just cross your fingers that Microsoft’s servers are still stable, and fire up that Xbox.