If your mid‑afternoon Zoom call suddenly became inaccessible yesterday, you weren’t the only one left staring at an “Unable to Connect” error. Zoom spent roughly two hours offline on Wednesday, April 16, leaving tens of thousands of people unable to join meetings, sign in, or even load the company’s home page.
Network‑monitoring data from Cisco’s ThousandEyes shows connectivity to Zoom.us dropped sharply at about 11:40 a.m. PT (2:40 p.m. ET). At the outage’s peak, user‑generated reports on DownDetector topped 67,000, indicating the disruption stretched well beyond North America.
Zoom has yet to share the root of the failure. One user on Reddit suggests it’s related to a domain‑registry misfire that briefly left the zoom.us address in a “server hold” state.
That kind of DNS issue can knock a site entirely offline until the record is re‑validated and propagates across the internet.
By about 2 p.m. PT (5 p.m. ET), Zoom posted on X that “service has now been restored.” Most users saw normal access resume soon after, once the DNS changes were updated through providers’ caches. The company thanked customers for their patience but offered no additional details about what caused the issues.
