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Zoom and Canvas Outages Impact Schools and Businesses as Classes Resume

For many students and teachers, the first day of school this week involved distance learning using the Zoom videoconferencing app. And many schools and universities experienced massive disruptions on Monday when Zoom underwent a widespread outage that left participants wondering what was going on.

A partial outage of nearly four hours commenced on Monday, just as businesses and schools started their days on the East Coast. The issues prevented some users from being able to authenticate on the Zoom website and they were also unable to start or join meetings. Other users were unable to sign up for paid accounts and could not upgrade or manage their services through the company's website.

“Virtual courtroom proceedings are being affected by a widespread Zoom outage in the U.S. and beyond that is preventing courts being able to start and join meetings,” the Michigan Supreme Court tweeted on Monday. The court has conducted hundreds of thousands of hearings online since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

The outage points to a larger problem as schools, businesses, local governments and individuals compete for bandwidth in a world that is still operating largely remotely because of COVID-19. Zoom is certainly one of the most popular conferencing platforms, but it's not the only game in town. Online learning platform Canvas has also been gaining traction, and the platform also experienced issues on Monday.

According to the New York Times, Indiana University students had trouble accessing both Zoom and Canvas on Monday. And the Clark County School District in Las Vegas reported that Canvas was running slowly due to a high volume of users.

Canvas spokesperson Cory Edwards said the system slowed for about 75 percent of U.S. customers for roughly half an hour on Monday. Heavy traffic and usage caused the slowdown, according to the company.    

According to the website DownDetector, which tracks outages at social media and tech companies, significant outages occurred in major U.S. cities as well as the UK on Monday. The site recorded more than 15,000 reports of outages in places like New York, Washington, Atlanta, Chicago, St. Louis and San Francisco.

Edited by Maurice Nagle