Zooms video chat services suffered a mass outage on Monday, resulting in a disruption of schooling and work for many who are dependent on the company for learning and working from home during the Covid-19 pandemic. The company said it deployed a fix within hours after the first reports of problems which began early morning on Monday. Everything should be working properly now, the company said in a tweet around noon, apologizing for the interruption and inconvenience to its users. Zoom also promised to continue to monitor the situation but did not explain the cause of the outage. The problem comes just as many schools are starting their new school year, using Zoom to hold remote classes as the coronavirus pandemic has kept students from returning to the in-person classes. The impact on the San Francisco Bay Area was limited. School districts on the East Coast, like the one in Atlanta that serves about 50,000 students, were more heavily affected, according to a report by San Francisco Chronicle. Zoom is a San Francisco Bay Area-based company founded by Chinese American Eric Yuan. Because the pandemic has largely limited in-person and face-to-face interactions, hundreds of millions of people now use Zoom, up from about 10 million in 2019, the report said.
