Coronavirus: Surge in remote work strains Zoom services
Some Zoom services are faltering under the pressure from a huge influx in remote workers. Service disruptions are up significantly so far in March.
Zoom has struggled to keep some of its services online this week amid a spike in remote work because of the global coronavirus pandemic.
Users have had to wait significantly longer than usual to access recordings of Zoom meetings in the cloud. The company said its engineering team was working to resolve the issue, attributing the backlog to "excessive demand."
Zoom's dial-in numbers have also faltered several times this month. Elevated traffic has so far clogged audio lines in Japan, New York and Hong Kong, forcing users to connect to a meeting's audio using the internet. A dial-in number in Australia was also inaccessible at times this week.
Meanwhile, some users were intermittently unable to make and receive calls through Zoom Phone, the vendor's cloud telephony service, for extended periods of time this week.
Users have now dealt with 18 non-scheduled Zoom service disruptions in March. There were no such incidents in January and just one in February (an issue that affected only subscribers in Brazil).
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Guide to work-from-home tech, IT support during the pandemic
In a statement, Zoom said it was working to find a "long-term, sustainable solution" to the issues affecting Zoom Phone. The company thanked customers for their "patience and understanding" during an "unprecedented and challenging time for everyone."
Zoom is not the only collaboration vendor struggling to cope with a sudden surge in usage. Many users of Microsoft Teams were unable to send messages and perform other tasks on Monday. Some Teams users in Europe were affected by another chat outage on Tuesday.
Last week, experts said they didn't expect any of the major collaboration vendors to suffer outages that forced their services completely offline for multiple days. So far, that prediction has held. Nevertheless, the influx of remote workers is having some impact.
Zoom has not said how many new users it has gained in recent weeks, but its mobile client is now the most popular free download on Apple's App Store. Notably, countless schools and universities worldwide have begun to hold virtual classes on Zoom.
Statistics shared by other vendors provide clues to the surge in traffic Zoom is likely dealing with. Microsoft Teams gained 12 million daily active users between March 11 and March 18, a 37% increase. Slack added paid customers at nearly three times its typical rate between Feb. 1 and March 18.
Zoom's support team is also likely fielding complaints related to factors outside of the vendor's control, such as the quality of a user's home Wi-Fi. Residential connections are often less reliable than corporate networks.
