GoDaddy Error Causes Major Zoom Outage, Disrupting Services for Hours

Zoom users faced a major disruption on Wednesday afternoon after a DNS error, traced back to GoDaddy, took down the popular video conferencing platform for nearly two hours. The outage began at approximately 11:25 a.m. PDT and affected critical services including Zoom’s main website, login systems, and VoIP phones.

Zoom first acknowledged the issue at 12:17 p.m. PDT, citing domain name resolution problems with zoom.us. Users trying to access meetings or the company’s status page were met with messages such as “This site can’t be reached” or “Check if there’s a typo in zoom.us.” Even Zoom’s internal communication tools were hit, making it difficult for account managers to assist customers.

The root of the issue was eventually revealed in a final incident report. Between 2:25 p.m. and 4:12 p.m. ET, the zoom.us domain became inaccessible due to an error caused by GoDaddy Registry. A communication mishap between Zoom’s domain registrar, Markmonitor, and GoDaddy Registry led to an accidental server block of the domain.

Observability experts at Cisco’s ThousandEyes confirmed the DNS breakdown, noting that top-level nameservers no longer held records for zoom.us. As a result, Zoom’s content delivery network failed to connect to backend systems, causing widespread disruption across the platform.

Service was restored by 1:55 p.m. PDT. However, users were required to flush their DNS caches to resume access. Zoom even issued command-line instructions, introducing many Mac users to terminal commands involving sudo, a tool usually reserved for system administrators.

The final report emphasized that the incident was not due to a DDoS attack, product flaw, or security breach. Zoom, Markmonitor, and GoDaddy have since collaborated to resolve the issue and implement safeguards to prevent future occurrences.

Coincidentally, Spotify also experienced service issues around the same time on Wednesday, but the two incidents appear to be unrelated.