Video-calling service Zoom appears to be experiencing a major global outage, leaving thousands of users around the world unable to join conferences.
Problems started at around 15:17 BST and are ongoing, according to the website Downdetector, which monitors website outages.
Users in the US and the UK were both reporting being unable to join or start conferences via the website or the app.
The outage comes as millions of Brits have been forced to work from home amid the national rail strikes.
Video-calling service Zoom appears to be experiencing a major global outage, leaving thousands of users around the world unable to join conferences
Microsoft’s Outlook email platform was also hit by service issue this afternoon making it inaccessible to some users.
The company has confirmed the problem and said it is working to fix it, with no other services currently appearing to be impacted.
According to Microsoft’s own service status website, some Outlook users ‘may be unable to access their mailboxes via any connection method’ and may encounter ‘delays sending, receiving or accessing email messages’.
In a statement on the site, Microsoft said: ‘We’re continuing to analyse service monitoring telemetry to identify the next troubleshooting steps to mitigate the impact.’
The company added that the issue was specific to some users in Europe.
In an update, Microsoft said: ‘We’ve identified that our traffic management infrastructure is not working as expected.
‘We’ve successfully routed traffic to an alternate traffic management method, and we’re seeing an improvement in service availability since this process completed.
‘We’re continuing to monitor the service availability as it improves, while we determine the root cause.’
According to Down Detector, affected users are seeing messages telling them they have been unable to connect to a server, and are struggling to connect to the service from across a range of devices.
The monitoring service showed it began receiving reports of problems at around 9am on Tuesday.
Many frustrated Outlook users have also taken to Twitter to discuss the outage.
One user wrote: ‘Nearly throwing my laptop out the window before realising that Outlook emails are down.’
Another tweeted: ‘Service has been down for more than three hours and almost all our mailboxes. This is incredibly bad.’
And one vented: ‘Come on Microsoft. This should not be allowed to happen. Our whole company is crippled without the use of email and it’s been down for hours. Where the back up plan!?!? #Ridiculous.’
The outage appears to be unrelated to an issue at web infrastructure firm Cloudflare.
A major outage at Cloudflare caused hundreds of websites across the internet to stop working and return a ‘500 Internal Server error’ message this morning.
A content delivery network (CDN) is a distributed group of severs around the world that work in unison. Websites use these CDNs to deliver content from the cloud safely and as quickly as possible.
Cloudflare is the most popular content delivery network by some margin.
A major outage at Cloudflare caused hundreds of websites across the internet to stop working and return a ‘500 Internal Server error’ message this morning
Websites affected by the outage from around 07:34 BST this morning included Discord, Shopify, Fitbit, Peloton, Grindr, Ring, bet365, Google, NordVPN, JustEat and Ladbrokes, according to Downdetector, which monitors website outages.
Cloudflare acknowledged the issue in an update on its official Twitter account.
‘The Cloudflare team is aware of the current service issues and is working to resolve as quickly as possible,’ it stated.
The company implemented a fix at 08.20 BST and posted an update on its service status page at 09:06 BST claiming to have resolved the issue.
First published in Daily mail (UK)
