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.
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.
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.
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.)
> 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.
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.
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.