Zoom Glitch Freezes Thousands of Meetings — Some Workers Celebrated

If your afternoon meeting mysteriously vanished on Wednesday, you weren’t alone.

Zoom experienced a widespread outage that left tens of thousands of users unable to join meetings or access the platform, offering a surprise break to remote workers everywhere. The disruption peaked just after 3 p.m. ET, according to outage tracking site Downdetector.com, which logged over 60,000 reports at the height of the incident.

Service began recovering around 4:43 p.m. ET, and by 4:52 p.m., Zoom confirmed via its official X (formerly Twitter) account that things were back up and running. By that time, outage reports had sharply dropped to under 10,000 and continued to decline throughout the evening.

Zoom’s spokesperson acknowledged the disruption in a brief email to CNN but didn’t explain what caused the glitch.

The temporary shutdown sparked a wave of reactions across social media. While some professionals were frustrated, many welcomed the unexpected pause from their workday.

“Shoutout to Zoom for being down when I really didn’t want to go to a 4pm meeting,” one user wrote.

Another joked: “Zoom is down. No more work today.”

Zoom became a household name during the pandemic, turning into a lifeline for remote work, virtual classrooms, and family catch-ups. In addition to video conferencing, the platform also supports collaboration tools for businesses.

Interestingly, Zoom wasn’t the only tech hiccup of the day. Earlier on Wednesday, Spotify also encountered brief issues that left some users unable to stream audio. Those problems were resolved by midday, according to Spotify’s update on X.