Ddos 
On Wednesday afternoon Eastern Time, Zoom, the widely used remote video conferencing platform, experienced a massive and global outage. During the disruption, users were met with error messages indicating that the site could not be reached or suggesting that there might be a typo in the Zoom.us address.
Subsequent investigations revealed that the incident had nothing to do with Zoom’s own infrastructure. Instead, the issue stemmed from a critical error involving its domain—Zoom.us—whose resolution was suspended due to a mishap at the domain registry level. The registry responsible for .us domains is GoDaddy Register.
Zoom’s domain is managed through the registrar Markmonitor. The inquiry found that a communication failure occurred between Markmonitor and GoDaddy Register, which led the registry to erroneously suspend DNS resolution for the Zoom.us domain.
Although the problem has since been resolved, neither Zoom, Markmonitor, nor GoDaddy have disclosed the precise nature of the so-called communication error—nor what kind of failure could possibly justify a registry suspending an active and essential domain.
One poignant lesson from this incident is the risk of hosting one’s status page on the same domain and infrastructure as the primary service. A long-standing industry joke suggests that a platform’s status page should be hosted by a competitor—so that users can still access status information even if the platform itself goes offline.
Zoom, unfortunately, fell into this exact trap. Its status page was hosted on a subdomain—status.Zoom.us—which also became inaccessible once the primary domain went down. Even more problematic, Zoom’s enterprise clients and customer success managers communicate via Zoom itself, meaning that when the platform failed, clients had no means of contacting their account managers to ascertain the nature of the outage.
In contrast, GitHub took a more cautious approach by registering a separate domain—githubstatus.com—for its system status logs. However, even this page appears to be hosted within GitHub’s own data centers, raising concerns about its availability in the event of a total infrastructure failure.
GoDaddy is a domain registrar, while GoDaddy Register serves as the registry for .us domains. Though related, they operate as distinct entities.
Related Posts:
- Zoom Customers Advised to Update Software to Fix Security Vulnerabilities
- Double Trouble: DDoS and Internal Errors Cause Major Microsoft Azure Outage
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