[HN Gopher] Zoom.us is down
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Zoom.us is down
Author : rkwasny
Score : 142 points
Date : 2022-06-21 14:05 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (us02web.zoom.us)
(TXT) w3m dump (us02web.zoom.us)
| boplicity wrote:
| We're hosting a live event in 3 hours -- expecting 1,000 people
| to show up. Hopefully things will be working by then!
| DoctorOW wrote:
| My day job is doing the same size event over Zoom at the same
| time...
|
| What a weird coincidence.
| ta988 wrote:
| You have 3 hours to setup an alternative. That's doable if you
| have the emails.
| kypro wrote:
| What's the quick alternative out of interest? And is it free?
| xigoi wrote:
| I'd say Jitsi, though I'm not sure how it handles 1000
| people.
| bzxcvbn wrote:
| It doesn't.
| freemint wrote:
| It can. If the jitsi has proper videobridges setup it
| can.
| wantguns wrote:
| https://meet.element.io/randommeetname
| danuker wrote:
| You can host a video stream (but make it low-def; 1000 people
| x 1MBPS = 1GBPS)
|
| https://obsproject.com/
|
| Alternatively use a centralized service (YouTube, Twitch).
|
| Or, there's also the P2P Jami (but this requires the
| participants to install something):
|
| https://jami.net/
| whoomp12342 wrote:
| but a lot of embarrassing noise if it would work just fine in
| 3 hours. tough call. I suggest using an IRC channel for the
| event instead.
| gberger wrote:
| It's even more embarrassing if it ends up not working.
| Better safe than sorry.
| whoomp12342 wrote:
| wooooooooooooooooooooooosh
| freemint wrote:
| Please what? Who is your audience that more then 20% of
| them could reliably run an IRC client and join the right
| server?
| JellyBeanThief wrote:
| I believe that was a joke.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| I've been on nonstop zoom calls all morning (last 5 hours), no
| issues.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Same, not seeing any issues.
| xwowsersx wrote:
| Sorry to hear. We're here for you.
| wdb wrote:
| Going to be a productive day :)
| brink wrote:
| Probably not; teams will spend more time trying to use an
| alternative
| maest wrote:
| https://status.zoom.us is green, even though service is
| down/severely degraded.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Is it so hard? At my company, I set up a status page linked to
| a pinging service which automatically pings various endpoints
| every 5 minutes (as well as our 3rd-party dependencies) and
| automatically flags any problems if a ping does not respond.
|
| The pinging service and status page, at our scale, is free and
| our status page is actually useful and automated for 90% of our
| stuff.
| digitallyfree wrote:
| I do this at home using LMNS, very useful to detect service
| failures as well as latency spikes. I ping my upstream ISP
| router, Google, Cloudflare, my DNS provider, and several
| others.
|
| Note that as another commenter said this only tells if the
| server is up, not if the service is working properly or not.
| In this case it won't work since the Zoom website is loading
| fine but the meetings don't work properly.
| cortesoft wrote:
| That works for a website, but doesn't work for all outage
| types with a service like zoom. If the website/api is
| responding, but you can't create new calls, for example, the
| outage wouldn't be detected.
| phaer wrote:
| I think the problem might be less on the technical and more
| on the business-side of things.
|
| Status pages that raise customers confidence in your
| service are good from a marketing perspective.
|
| Automatically publishing uptime data without human review
| might be bad from a marketing perspective, if you don't
| trust the engineering department to actually deliver or if
| your service depends on too many external dependencies.
| mason55 wrote:
| The update lag has nothing to do with technical abilities.
| It's about things like marketing and contractual SLAs.
|
| If acknowledging downtime causes you to violate an SLA and
| pay a bunch of penalties then you don't want some automated
| script to trigger it.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| > violate an SLA and pay a bunch of penalties
|
| The SLA would not depend on what the status page reported,
| but the actual downtime. If the script malfunctioned, you
| wouldn't need to pay out because it wasn't actual downtime
| contractually - and if it was actual downtime, I guess it
| makes it harder to squeeze around but that's only if
| someone is carefully taking legally admissible evidence
| from the first minute the status page reports (which
| screenshots alone don't always meet).
| treeman79 wrote:
| I've come across a lot of websites that respond to health
| checks just fine. Because the page health check doesn't hit
| the database or other services.
| kull wrote:
| Service status pages are so useless.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| It's for nostalgia - the one bit of early web that's still
| unchanged.
| lxchase wrote:
| At this point, I just default to downdetector
| juice_bus wrote:
| What use are status pages when you need to get VP+ clearance to
| acknowledge an outage? We see this time and time again with
| major services.
|
| It is a shame that we have to find out about outages on HN.
| mbesto wrote:
| I'm actually building a product to solve this. If anyone is
| interested in beta testing, we should be rolling this out in
| 2~3 weeks. Shoot me an email: mbesto @ gmail service
| no_wizard wrote:
| This has made me realize why companies like pingdom have a
| business. I've always wondered, in the sense that I couldn't
| quite understand why you'd pay for someone just to ping
| things and alert you of outages (this was early in my career)
|
| But over the last 4 years specifically I not only understand
| it I can't imagine not having a service like it.
|
| Disclaimer: I don't work for pingdom and my current company
| doesn't use their services, I have in the past, they're
| pretty good, but I'm just using them as an example here
| jmartens wrote:
| If you like pingdom, you'll love what we are building at
| Metrist https://metrist.io/
| philote wrote:
| I guess one could argue it isn't an outage since it only
| seems to have affected a subset of users. I got on a zoom
| call when this issue started and we had 3 of the 4
| participants. Only one couldn't connect due to the issue.
|
| But I do agree they should be able to monitor things better
| and show some sort of update on their status page as soon as
| possible.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I feel like this is almost worse. It would be awful if you
| were the only person who couldn't connect to a high-stakes
| meeting. At least if it happens to everyone, it's obvious
| that the problem is on Zoom's end.
| danachow wrote:
| If you stake your life's happiness on pleasing morons
| (and the morons in this case are those that pretty much
| don't immediately assume technical problems out of your
| control) - you're pretty much guaranteed a bad time.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| A couple of months ago, I finally landed a first-round
| job interview at a place where I've wanted to work for
| several years. The interview was conducted over Zoom.
|
| What would have happened if Zoom had worked fine on their
| end, but I was randomly unable to connect? Perhaps it
| would have been fine--they would have been understanding,
| and we would have rescheduled for another day. Perhaps if
| they hadn't been understanding, I shouldn't have wanted
| to work for them anyway.
|
| But, I don't know. I wanted to work for them, and I was
| competing with other candidates who presumably
| interviewed on different days. Hiring processes are
| inherently imperfect, and lots of things can be
| consciously or unconsciously treated as a red flag.
|
| (And yes, lots of other things could have happened on the
| day of the interview. But I still find this scenario
| particularly scary to think about.)
| danachow wrote:
| > Hiring processes are inherently imperfect, and lots of
| things can be consciously or unconsciously treated as a
| red flag.
|
| Exactly, so it's weird to worry about a Zoom problem in
| particular. If anything it's a little better now since
| most people are conditioned to think of technical
| problems as less likely the affected persons fault
| (that's why I referred to the alternative as "morons") -
| even if you left yourself _plenty_ of time and did
| everything right and public transit fucked you over it
| was never a good look.
| CaptainZapp wrote:
| No problem for us.
|
| We use Skype for Business, which is so flaky at times
| that the default assumption if somebody is not joining is
| that the system conked on her.
| mkl95 wrote:
| Whether you consider it an outage or not seems to be a
| political / PR thing these days. I used to work on a SaaS
| that relied on a handful of big customers to make payroll.
| If their favourite stuff stopped working, hell ensued. On
| the other hand Atlassian pretended nothing was going on for
| a while recently, because they could afford to lose 400
| customers.
| interestica wrote:
| So for you it was only a 25% outage?
| reaperducer wrote:
| _I guess one could argue it isn 't an outage since it only
| seems to have affected a subset of users_
|
| If an electric company serving a million people leaves 100
| of them in the dark, it's still an "outage."
|
| Why give a free pass to Zoom? Because it's a tech company,
| and we've been trained to accept failures as the cost of
| admission?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| > What use are status pages
|
| Marketing and sales. Not /s
|
| We are in dire need of something crowdsourced, or where
| someone like DataDog or other telemetry systems offer you the
| ability to share non sensitive metrics publicly for various
| cloud or SaaS systems that they publish.
|
| Edit: y'all are amazing with these monitoring tools!
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| I use uptimerobot to monitor a lot of endpoints that I
| depend upon but don't really control. Been burned by first
| party status pages way too many times.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Does downdetector.com meet that need?
|
| At least for Steam, I've found it pretty useful.
| i67vw3 wrote:
| Downdetector was itself down today for half an hour when
| the cloudflare incident happened.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| For public facing endpoints or front ends, yes. For
| complex systems where you'd need sensors inside (AWS,
| GCP, anything IaaS or PaaS, etc), no.
|
| Somewhat but not entirely similar to BGP looking glass
| systems.
| geocrasher wrote:
| You mean like https://mcbroken.com/ ?
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| Oooooo. OpenStreetMap has clearly visible county lines.
| I'm in lust.
| jmartens wrote:
| That's exactly what we are building at https://metrist.io/
| mbesto wrote:
| > We are in dire need of something crowdsourced, or where
| someone like DataDog or other telemetry systems offer you
| the ability to share non sensitive metrics publicly for
| various cloud or SaaS systems that they publish.
|
| This is literally what I'm building right now. See reply
| above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31825239
|
| Shoot me an email if anyone is interested in getting beta
| access.
| cmccart wrote:
| New Relic has had this for a few years now for a couple
| hundred of the most requested domains:
| https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/query-your-data/explore-
| query...
|
| Disclaimer - I work at New Relic but not on this.
| lamontcg wrote:
| > Marketing and sales. Not /s
|
| When I got hired at Amazon in 2001 we had a "gonefishin"
| page that was a static page that would be served in the
| event of an outage (this was before status pages, but it
| was kind of the same thing -- public acknowledgement of a
| major incident). The standard protocol was within minutes
| of a sev 1 to make a decision to display the GF page once
| it was confirmed that the whole site was down and then work
| to fix the issue.
|
| By the time I left in 2006 that was no longer policy since
| reporters had setup monitoring for that page to detect
| outages and report on service availability so they just let
| it crash and return 500s or whatever the failure mode was.
| Optimize for making the job of external agencies doing
| reporting on their availability harder instead of easier.
| [deleted]
| austinpena wrote:
| Built something like that at https://taloflow.ai/is-aws-
| down
|
| Looks like there's been some errors too
| dancemethis wrote:
| Hopefully forever, one less privacy-hostile proprietary thingie
| around.
| slenk wrote:
| Because the other corporate solutions are better? I will take
| Zoom over Teams/Google
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| A lot of folks I know, like BlueJeans[0].
|
| I have not used it, myself, so I can't report on its
| effectiveness.
|
| [0] https://www.bluejeans.com
| xigoi wrote:
| Ah yes, the only three video meeting software in the world.
| dijonman2 wrote:
| I think Google is a better option especially if you have corp
| gmail. I am not a fan of o365/teams so I do agree with you
| there. Just my grievances are rooted in UX
| josephcsible wrote:
| Jitsi and BigBlueButton are better.
| rkwasny wrote:
| Zoom is an enterprise solution, privacy is not really a
| problem, they don't sell ads
| brink wrote:
| OP is talking about China and the CCP, I think
| el-salvador wrote:
| I think Zoom now has a separate brand for China.
|
| I was in a Zoom call with a big Chinese company some months
| ago, and they used something that looked the same as zoom
| but had a Chinese name.
|
| Edit:
|
| I think it was this one:
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/08/03/zoom-to-halt-direct-
| sale...
|
| https://www.zhumu.com/
| fsflover wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23480918
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28210076
| mikece wrote:
| I can assure you I am not a cat. And I didn't crash Zoom.
|
| Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoom_Cat_Lawyer
| lachtan wrote:
| Same for us, we're hosting 3 events right now, neither seems to
| be working, nor can we log in to their website.
| flatiron wrote:
| im on a zoom right now, works fine....
| bombcar wrote:
| Don't close the bridge! I've had them continue to work as long
| as you didn't close it when there's an authentication, etc
| error.
| dangus wrote:
| Close the bridge, then when it doesn't work you have a valid
| excuse not to work.
| vaylian wrote:
| or a valid excuse to actually get work done instead of
| wasting time in meetings.
| dangus wrote:
| In the employer employee relationship, the employer is
| responsible for providing functioning tools.
|
| Maintaining productivity when those tools cease to
| function encourages the employer to underinvest in tools
| and burden the employee.
| duxup wrote:
| >Don't close the bridge!
|
| Unless you don't want there to be a meeting(s)... just say'n.
| bombcar wrote:
| Your lack of dedication to Sparkle Meetings has been noted.
| boplicity wrote:
| Maybe it's just the website, login, links, etc that are broken?
| I can't log in and can't open Zoom links.
| 300bps wrote:
| I'm on my fourth Zoom for the past 3 hours and have not had a
| single problem at all today.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Hooray for centralisation of infrastructure!
| practice9 wrote:
| I thought WebRTC solved some of these problems, but seems like
| peer discovery would still need to be centralised in some way.
| Are there any protocols that would solve this? (excluding email
| or blockchain both of which would require additional extensions
| or standards to create a solution with smooth UX)
| avrionov wrote:
| Unfortunately WebRTC provides only part of the features
| needed to build Web Conferencing app. The main issue is that
| p2p connections don't work for more 5 attendees in the same
| session. After that is better to have MCU or SFU.
|
| Other features like recording a much more reliable if they
| are implemented server side.
| jeromegv wrote:
| Not the best example as there's likely a dozen service someone
| could switch to. People choose Zoom mostly because they like
| it, not by lack of choice.
| xigoi wrote:
| It's the host that chooses the platform, participants don't
| get to choose.
| whoomp12342 wrote:
| well there should be more competitors I actually like.
| geraldwhen wrote:
| Businesses aren't willing to pay, and thus they don't
| exist.
| noirbot wrote:
| They aren't? Every company I've worked at pays through
| the nose for one of GTM/Zoom/BlueJeans/Lifesize/Chime.
| Zoom is definitely the least bad of them in my
| experience, not that I like it at all. Lack of customers
| willing to pay doesn't seem to have stopped there from
| being a bounty of terrible alternatives.
| whoomp12342 wrote:
| isnt it funny how we love decentralization in the cloud but
| that really just consolidates our resources to 3 main
| companies?
|
| like, yes I get it multi regions makes you safer, but given
| vendor lock if aws fucks up across the board with a bug, we all
| fuck up across the board.
| aaahq wrote:
| Able to log in again as of 10:40am Eastern.
| jasonjayr wrote:
| Zoom's Phone Service is working for us as of just now ...
| lndevops wrote:
| Status pages lie to us/are generally inaccurate for a bunch of
| reasons. Here's just a few of them: https://metrist.io/blog/why-
| status-pages-are-lying-to-you-an...
| morpheuskafka wrote:
| At least one Zoom Enterprise splash page is showing the generic
| nginx error message, which initially made me think it was just
| our tenant since the other subdomains I tried would load the
| login screen. But sounds like that is not the case.
| fancymcpoopoo wrote:
| so what? shit goes down once in a while. sometimes you have a
| cloudy day.
| rkwasny wrote:
| What a day...
| bombcar wrote:
| Hmm going to https://us02web.zoom.us/join and clicking a join
| link directly worked fine 30 minutes ago.
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(page generated 2022-06-21 23:02 UTC)