Zoom Outage Disrupts First Day Of Classes For UMass Amherst Students

AMHERST (CBS) -- UMass Amherst students started off day one of the fall semester a few hours later than they expected because of a Zoom outage.

"It didn't work for him so he canceled class for today so it's been a tough day so far," said UMass Amherst junior James Cutroni.

UMass Freshman Eli Slovin was disappointed the first two classes of his college career didn't happen. "Woke up like 7:15, first day of school getting amped up," he said.

His professors canceled the classes because of a nationwide Zoom outage.

"We were all like this is pretty bizarre," said Slovin.

Reports of students, employees, and clients not being able to start or join zoom meetings and webinars started to flood the internet Monday morning.

Zoom spent much of the morning investigating and keeping customers updated through it's Twitter account. By 1 p.m., the system was back up and running.

"It has huge implications and a huge impact because it's an absolute necessity from an infrastructure standpoint," said cyber expert Peter Tran. He said he's not surprised about the outage.

Tran said Zoom quickly become a part of students' and employees' everyday lives.

"Zoom was really just a personal use collaborative platform and then all a sudden overnight it became a critical infrastructure," said Tran.

For Eli Solvin, Zoom came back online just in time for his first Spanish class. "It definitely was exciting when it started to work," he said.