Florida A&M University was among stakeholders nationwide affected by a significant Zoom outage, that disrupted digital operations and led to the rescheduling of critical meetings, including FAMU’s Board of Trustees session.
The outage, which began at 11:25 a.m. and lasted nearly two hours, stemmed from a rare domain issue involving Zoom’s domain name system (DNS) registration. This system allows users to get to websites and other internet resources.
According to a status update from Zoom, the issue originated from miscommunication between Markmonitor, which manages Zoom’s domain registrations, and GoDaddy Registry, the operator of the “.us” domain, which led to GoDaddy mistakenly blocking the zoom.us domain.
The block prevented users from accessing or initiating new Zoom meetings and services, leaving already connected sessions unaffected.
At FAMU, the disruption was felt immediately.
Robert Seniors, Vice President of Information Technology Services and Chief Information Officer, said the outage impacted both classroom and administrative functions.
“We had to immediately notify departments, faculty, and students, many of whom rely on Zoom not only for instruction but also for scheduled advising and committee meetings,” Seniors said.
Seniors stated that the cancellation of the April 17 Board of Trustees meeting was a significant consequence. The meeting has been rescheduled to April 22, but the delay momentarily halted important university governance discussions. Seniors emphasized that the university is reviewing contingency planning for future outages.
“We’re now evaluating alternative platforms and redundancies so that we’re not wholly dependent on one system,” Seniors said. “We’ll also be guiding our campus community on best practices for digital preparedness.”
Students also had to think quickly during the sudden zoom outage.
Laylah Holloway, a student journalist with FAMU’s 90.5 Flava Station, had been planning to connect with the president of the FAMU Gospel Choir regarding exclusive behind-the-scenes coverage of the choir’s upcoming spring concert.
“After we tried several times logging into Zoom, we decided to hop on FaceTime to keep the conversation flowing,” Holloway said.
Zoom is responding in collaboration with GoDaddy and Markmonitor to avoid this from happening again. In its official statement, Zoom acknowledged the gravity of the situation.
“Zoom is aware of the critical nature of our services… our goal is to do everything possible to make sure this type of incident cannot happen again.”
Zoom reported that by 1:12 p.m., the issue had been resolved. However, due to DNS storage, users experienced lingering effects until information was updated and completed. Zoom has since implemented preventive measures, including a registry lock to prevent similar incidents.
As remote and hybrid operations continue to play a pivotal role in higher education, the April 16 outage serves as a reminder of the importance of digital infrastructure and response readiness.
“Technology will never be perfect,” Seniors said, “but our preparedness can be, this was a wakeup call for every institution, not just ours.”