Zoom Outage Caused by GoDaddy Error Disrupts Services for Nearly Two Hours

A significant misstep by GoDaddy Registry disrupted global access to Zoom for nearly 90 minutes on Wednesday, April 16, cutting off video meetings, disabling phone systems, and briefly breaking the Zoom website itself. The outage left users scrambling — not just to reconnect, but to understand how one of the internet’s most popular communication platforms could suddenly vanish.

The incident began at 11:25 a.m. Pacific Time, when users attempting to access services encountered DNS resolution errors and messages like “This site can’t be reached” and “Check if there’s a typo in zoom.us.” Even Zoom’s own status page — hosted at status.zoom.us — was unreachable.

According to an official incident report from Zoom, the source of the disruption was a domain resolution issue affecting the zoom.us domain. Users across North America were affected mid-meeting, while those trying to contact Zoom customer support also hit dead ends, since many of Zoom’s internal Voip phone systems depend on its own infrastructure.

The root of the problem was later traced to a communication failure between Zoom’s domain registrar, Markmonitor, and GoDaddy Registry, which manages the entire .us top-level domain. This miscommunication led GoDaddy to erroneously block the zoom.us domain, effectively removing it from the internet for a brief but very disruptive window of time.

Analysis from Cisco’s observability arm, ThousandEyes, confirmed it was a DNS-related failure. “Top-level domain nameservers did not have the records for zoom.us,” their report stated. Without DNS entries, content delivery networks (CDNS) couldn’t reach backend services. This ripple effect meant Zoom’s entire infrastructure — from its main site to its CDN-distributed meeting platform — was temporarily offline.

Services were finally restored at 1:55 p.m. Pacific Time, but for many users, full functionality didn’t resume until they manually flushed their DNS caches. For Mac users, the support team issued detailed terminal instructions, including the use of the powerful sudo command, offering a crash course in command-line tools to a generation of corporate users who may have never opened Terminal before.

Zoom later confirmed that the outage was not the result of a cyberattack, DDoS event, or internal system failure. Instead, the incident report issued at 5:31 p.m. clarified that the problem originated solely from the erroneous domain block.

“Zoom, Markmonitor, and GoDaddy worked quickly to identify and remove the block, which restored service to the domain zoom.us,” the report stated. “GoDaddy and Markmonitor are working together to prevent this from happening again.”

This incident highlights the fragile dependencies that underpin internet services. A single error in DNS management — especially at the registry level — can render massive online platforms unreachable. Given GoDaddy’s responsibility for the .us domain namespace, the implications for other services using .us domains are considerable.

Coincidentally, Spotify also experienced service issues around the same time, but the two events appear to be unrelated.

For now, IT teams everywhere are likely double-checking their registrar communications — and maybe teaching users how to flush DNS caches just in case.