Zoom Partial Outages
status.zoom.us
status.zoom.us
Let's wait until the first person asks if they use 'Kubernetes' yet.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/most-zoom-runs-aw...
Guessing egress discounts are what drives Zoom's picks for infrastructure.
They talked about it before, must have got a great deal from Oracle trying to push their cloud aggressively against AWS. Zoom is global and multi cloud so it makes sense to get a few more datacenters if they're served on a plate.
I realize that the old internet of distributed services and actual competition is likely something those who grew up in the facebook world will not even have a conceptual understanding of, but all of the monopolistic type centralization of services (everyone on Zoom, everyone buying from Amazon, everyone using Uber, everyone getting information through Google, etc.) is immensely dangerous, to a degree that simply cannot be overstated. Its digital, literal monoculture, where one event can have devastating cascading impacts.
In many ways the current virus situation is precisely that, a devastating impact due to a monoculture created and pursued by globalism, where diversity is destroyed and everyone is an equal and controlled human entity. The very crowd that is always demanding "diversity", is also the crowd destroying actual diversity by destroying differences and trying to turn us all into the same, equal thing.
Nobody would accept that. Yet for video calling we’ve gone down a path where it’s normalised. Yet the underlying technologies are not so different to those used for traditional audio calling, video codecs and audio codecs and transports for them can mostly be treated the same.
I dunno, I realise this is somewhat of a tangent to your point but I think about it a lot and it bugs me to imagine how it could have been if we went the other way. Feels a bit like how large infrastructure project don’t seem to be possible like they were 40 years ago... something makes it that much less likely that a common good will come into being.
People want convenience. Tools are there to serve us for as little effort from our end as possible. Zoom does that. And even for audio calls, people will often prefer private gardens like WhatsApp, FaceTime, Skype or whatever to simply avoid the cost of a carrier call because you can't beat free and easy.
The rest of your argument makes sense, but this part doesn't.
Not being beaten by police or being verbally abused because of your skin colour is the opposite of 'turn us all into the same, equal thing'
Those peopl just want equal rights. Is it that hard to understand?
Needs some setup, but if you are using Jitsi that seems reasonable
Jisti. Can’t dial in. Utterly useless for anyone with bad internet for this reason.
You can dial in (at least for a call on https://meet.jit.si - I don't about self-hosted instances).
Click the person symbol ('Invite more people') in the bottom-right of the window, and a modal dialog will appear with a phone number and PIN code to enter.
If you click 'more numbers' you will be shown alternative phone numbers for many countries (UK, US, France, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Japan, Switzerland).
Enterprise
For them, something mediocre but gaplessly sufficient is preferable to something being mostly excellent with a few big caveats.
For example, it has to run as a on-premise hosted service, or has to tie into an arcane security environment which hasn't been updated in a long time where bandwidth is already an issue.
Imagine running that many copies of custom software in one environment, each with their ideal solution
And a lot of these former WebEx customers have now moved over to Zoom[1]. It’s a relatively easy transition for corporate IT to make.
Lots of people are using their paid zoom accounts more than their cell phone during the day and even for work.
Downtime means work is down too - not just for classrooms.
They lied about and continue to misrepresent their security.
They keep adding and then removing personally invasive features (eg. the linkedin sharer).
There are more: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com...
I don't know why people are so willing to forgive them.
Zoom just made a tool that could be used by everyone, everywhere, for free. And they saved us.
Yeah, I think that's something to celebrate.
- It was very easy to get people to get on the same zoom call as everyone else
- It had the best quality for video conferencing.
We also thought that Zoom had encryption. (Turns out ...). There were very easy screen shares.
The startup I joined is remote-first, though it did not start that way. After I joined from out of state, we just all started doing that. We used Zoom a lot.
In short, I think Zoom got as big as they did because they addressed enough of the pain points in the end user experience.
Today, I don’t even have skype installed anywhere.
Microsoft originally had a product suite called Lync which had chat and calling. It was pretty good. Then MS rebranded it as "Skype for Business." It was the same infrastructure and program with a facelift to use Skype's styling. That did not work out well, and was rebranded as Microsoft teams.
I'd suspect the whole point of acquiring Skype was to move it to enterprise, which it only did cosmetically and turned out to be a failure. MS Teams is alive and well though.
This. Zoom had the highest chance of success when you found yourself in the middle of a call and thought « Hey, it would be great if we got Tom on this call » and Tom barely knew how to use a computer.
Getting someone on a WebEx would’ve taken several minutes on software installs alone.
I'm told it's much better than most others. I haven't really noticed a dramatic difference, but that seems to be the consensus.
Zoom had the lowest friction, most idiot proof solution while still being decent quality and having enough useful features for classes and meetings, etc.
(as it turned out, some of those low-friction design choices also had some negative security and integrity consequences)
It can't be overstated! They won over with sheer quality. I suffered through evaluating several video conferencing products over a few month period, and Zoom was the only one that worked properly.
The created a product that works, setting themselves apart in a sea of garbage.
Over the past year I've clocked more than 50,000 minutes in Zoom alone, and it is much better than any other I've used.
Using zoom was frictionless, specially pre-Corona Times.
- Keyboard shortcuts for most common tasks (new meeting, copy meeting id)
- Just send a link to invite someone to a meeting (no need to wait for the "e-mail" to arrive, or to download an ics attachment with the meeting details).
- Just click on the link to join a meeting
- Just click share to share screen (no more "can you make me the presenter" conversations)
- Super easy way of asking remote control (no "click to take remote control" message)
- Easy to use audio testing feature
- Meeting ID on top of every meeting so it was easy to see and share (this was been deprecated though, after someone from the Uk gov't published their meeting id on social media)
- Added everyone on your domain name as a contact (this was disabled as a default setting after this happened with an European ISP e-mail addresses)
While competing solutions still required meeting id, meeting password, typing your name and e-mail, "taking the presenter role" before screen sharing, downloading a temporary executable file, showed weird gray boxes during screen sharing.
Other nice features where; Multiplatform Win/Mac/Linux/Browser based, Android, iOS, lots of dial-in phone numbers, even in my third world country (!), also audio/video quality was more stable even with our third world internet.
Did I also mention their executable clients where super responsive.
We have identified the issue causing users to be unable to authenticate to the Zoom website (zoom.us) and unable to start and join Zoom Meetings and Webinars
Even with a distributed architecture, auth/login flows are often some of the harder problems to horizontally scale without introducing inconsistencies of behavior.
I wish 'em a speedy recovery!
Cisco blew it.
We're partnering with both, rest is also ran. Massive deals in F500 globally underway. Both also have accelerating roadmaps, visible in the last Zoom update that pre-empted 50% of mmhmm's offering.
As a competitor, do not publish your roadmap, both Zoom and Teams have highly able and agile product teams running them. Super impressive people with a lot of resources.
Zoom’s audio & video feels way better though.
Completely agree re Cisco as well: I also have Cisco Jabber and it’s basically terrible at everything — audio, video and especially screen sharing. Dunno what happened there.
Are they expecting students to “sit in class” by watching a live zoom lecture?
Too many schools are taking the approach that our learning wasn't structured enough in the spring, so we are going to the opposite extreme.
It's going to have a negative effect on the children and caregivers.
We have non-technical people on tight deadlines trying to reproduce brick and mortar on a computer screen. It's not going to end well. I feel for them, they are trying their best.
Not that professionals necessarily have the greatest attention spans; I've only somewhat joked that I couldn't deal with all-day high school classes today even in-person. But all-day Zoom seems totally undoable for kids.
The issue though comes down to each school is mandated to have so many school days and hours of instruction for the year. You can't just have a school year of 1 hour days and call it a year.
If they don't actively teach the students for 900+ hours for the school year, they are in violation of the state mandate. Does giving an assignment online with no instruction count as hours? How many hours?
When in doubt, take what you know, which is in person lectures online and reach the mandates. The children will suffer. The teachers will suffer. Administration/Government will meet their mandates.
In my opinion, having a lecture recorded is a wonderful boon, as you can go back and rewatch a section if it wasn't clear the first time.
But I don't know about you but I find I very rarely get around to watching things like conference video for sessions I missed live. You end up with a big backlog and it's easier just to ignore the whole thing.
I agree that for traditional meetings/conferences they're not super useful (though I often find myself enjoying presentations from tech conferences long after the conference was held). But that was a different scenario than I was defending.
Getting kids to do the same thing genuinely helps even if it's just "don't wear your bedtime clothes."
It's true that kids do better with structure, but I've not heard that "structure" is the reason for uniforms.
Not sure how four hours in front of a virtual lecture works for kindergarten, or why it was seen as a viable approach.
Seriously lamenting the lack of innovative thinking around this. What a wasted opportunity to do something truly interesting with education.
This stuff is hard, and so many classroom models fail that I'm not surprised that "replicate the one that works" is gaining traction.
The kids require supervision by parents on the other end of the call to achieve even close to this (the parents don't have the same "classroom management" skills), so I figure... "Might as well do it myself". That's the main Zoom vs. Kindergarten difference.
Not to mention that home is filled with lots of fun, distracting stuff that the kids otherwise wouldn't have access to during the school day in a classroom.
Our school is 100% distance learning. When they were going to allow distance learning and in person, they were planning to have completely separate classes for this so they could better optimize for your particular medium.
Not only is it going to be challenging for the kindergarten kids to stay focused on their class via chrome book, the SAME teacher is managing the kids in the classroom and the kids online. The kindergarten teachers each have an assistant too (as they did before Covid-19) so that helps a bit.
I am fortunate my wife stays at home with the kids. I can't imagine what it will be like for parents of kindergartners who both work, or parents with special needs kids or parents who don't speak English. I am supportive of social distancing in these times. But its going to be tough on the kids.
One improvement: the high schooler has some sessions with 90 kids (!!). So at least they can use their phones to goof off and text each other which they couldn’t do IRL.
There’s no easy answer to this, but I really wonder about the effects of this on kids, especially the younger ones. Kids, even liners, are pretty gregarious by nature, and there’s a lot of important physical contact among the little kids (and, for different reasons, teens :-)). Seems like there will likely be some developments issues down the road.
My district started with Zoom in the spring, then switched to Meet when the Zoom security issues got hot, and ultimately settled on Webex for the fall because it was the most like Zoom, carried enterprise support, and because Meet is still missing far too many necessary features for teachers (breakout rooms, raise hand, etc).
This showed “coming in fall”: https://educationblog.microsoft.com/en-us/2020/06/20-updates...
We've had a handful of school district customers sign up recently and use us to build aggregated status pages or send notifications to teachers and administrators when Zoom (or Blackboard or whatever) is down. So there seems to be a use case there beyond the "DevOps" market we currently cater to.
This issue only affects joining Zoom meetings through the web client. If you join using the desktop or mobile client to the meeting ID directly, you should still be able to join a meeting.
It was painful to get them to admit anything was wrong, until I asked if this would impact 9-1-1 calls too, then they admitted an issue with full-digit dialing (aka: 10 digit dialing).
Even units that were resistant to switching from the conference line migrated over.
I wonder how this afternoon will go if this continues.
But hyperlinks are not.
And the error message is strange:
>There is no accout for zuora account id:2c92a00d6ff0e970016ffbde74ae767c (3,201)
It seems that everyone having issues is seeing the same error.
Unfortunately this provides a perverse incentive to NOT report an outage, as even a small outage would be a contract breach for a "many nines" SLA, whereas many small breaches added up over a month could also breach a contract for (relatively) smaller companies. If the client doesn't notice, then it doesn't count.
Anecdotally, the only status pages I've seen that update automatically have no monetary incentive to maintain the page.
Ain't that the truth !
I remember working with organisations that had Verizon leased lines.
100% SLA the Verizon sales reps would say, normally accompanied with a sheet of paper that said "100% SLA" in big bold letters.
Of course the line would go down. Some manager would the come to my desk, thumping his fist and talking about the 100% SLA. I'd say "sure, but did you read the small print".
In all my years, I don't think I ever saw anyone get a SLA payment from Verizon.
If you're just getting a phone number and a few extensions from them for small office telephony, no. If you're leasing multiple high-availability DIA circuits from them, far easier (but still absurdly difficult). Speaking from first-hand, nightmarish experience dealing with their "VEC".
Don't get me started on trying to get SLA payment when they goof up LNPs either.
Zuora seems to be a bit like Stripe? Maybe it's their outage, or maybe someone at Zoom forgot to pay the Zuora bill..
Gitlab had an outage today related to Zuora going down. My guess is the backends directly call to these APIs and they don't have any form of caching or storing the info from these APIs elsewhere.
(plus, training out of practise professors on two video conferencing systems? No way that would end well)
This isn't their area of expertise, and asking teachers to migrate to the backup and inform and assist their students to get online during an outage of unknown length isn't reasonable.
Snow days in 2020 will be replaced with Zoom Outage days.
And to make matters worse, 99+% of the Zoom meetings could easily take place on Jitsi Meet, Teams, etc.
[1]: https://mobile.twitter.com/c1truz_/status/124473767293082419...
[2]: https://theintercept.com/2020/03/31/zoom-meeting-encryption/
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/zoom-cites-chine...
I guess Eternal September came early to Zoom this year.
Later on, i will be making a VM for Zoom explicitly.