Zoom down status: App facing a DarkStorm DDoS attack? Here's what we know

Zoom on Wednesday confirmed that it was facing ‘server’ issues amid a massive global outage. Several users complained about seeing an Error code 503 as they tried to use the video calling application and website. The company said it is investigating ‘the domain name resolution issues on the zoom.us domain that is affecting multiple services’. Several social media users claimed that Zoom is under a DDoS attack by a group called DarkStorm.

This is after DarkStorm posted a tweet, indicating that it had hacked Zoom's servers.

“we do work on usa platforms as we said,” the group further warned on X, platform formerly known as Twitter.

Zoom Communications is yet to address the cyberattack claims. Downdetector, a platform that tracks online outages, showed over 50,000 reports about issues on the Zoom app and website.

Reacting to the group's post amid the outage, one social media user wrote: “Looks like @zoom is today's cyber attack victim! Team Dark Storm is claiming they attacked the platform successfully and http://zoom.us has been dead for a good 30 minutes at least.”

“Zoom, a possible victim of a cyberattack. After claiming responsibility for the global outage of Spotify, the DarkStorm group now claims to have taken down the Zoom platform worldwide. It is indeed inaccessible (1:17 PM, Central Mexico Time),” another person tweeted.

What is a DDoS attack?

A DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal functioning of a targeted server, service, or network by overwhelming it with a flood of internet traffic. The "distributed" aspect means the attack originates from multiple sources, often thousands of compromised devices (e.g., computers, IoT devices) forming a botnet, making it harder to block than a single-source attack.

Zoom outage page update

Zoom's status page explained which services are affected by the issues. “This incident affects: Zoom Meetings (Zoom Meetings), Zoom Phone - Global (Web Portal (Admin/Users/Provisioning/Dashboard & Reporting)), Zoom Contact Center - Global (Web Portal (Admin/Users/Provisioning)), and Zoom Website (Web Portal)” an update read.