Thought Leadership
On April 6 2025 the Zoom video conferencing platform was temporarily unavailable for many users. Although it initially appeared that the cause lay with Zoom itself, it is now clear that the fault lay with an external service provider.
Over 60,000 users report disruption
According to the internet service Downdetector, which monitors online service outages, over 60,000 people reported problems with Zoom. In the USA in particular, many users were unable to start or take part in meetings. In the meantime, the number of people affected has risen to up to 70,000.
Technical cause lay with GoDaddy
The cause of the outage was surprising: it was not zoom’s own infrastructure that was affected, but the domain name service. More precisely, the zoom.us domain was temporarily unavailable.
According to the report, there was a miscommunication between the domain registrar Markmonitor and the domain registry service GoDaddy. As a result of this communication breakdown, the central Zoom domain was blocked by mistake – which in turn meant that many users were no longer able to access the platform.
No hacker attack and no internal disruption
Zoom made it clear in an official statement that no technical problems in its own network or product were the cause of the outage.
The disruption lasted around two hours before access to the platform could be restored.
GoDaddy criticized again
GoDaddy has long been criticized for inadequate security precautions. At the beginning of the year, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) accused the company of serious cyber security deficiencies.
Among other things, the FTC found that GoDaddy had neither taken a proper inventory of its systems nor carried out regular software updates. Measures such as two-factor authentication or sufficient security monitoring had also been neglected. In the past, these failures led to several serious security incidents between 2019 and 2022, in which attackers were able to gain unauthorized access to customer data and websites.
Even if Zoom itself is not to blame for the outage, the incident shows how dependent large platforms are on third parties – especially domain services. For many companies that rely on video conferencing, this represents a serious vulnerability.
