Zoom glitches, briefly grinding US schools to a halt

Teachers and parents got a brief glimpse of a new kind of pandemic-era nightmare Monday when Zoom – the video-conferencing service that powers everything from distance learning to business meetings to casual, socially distant get-togethers – abruptly went dead.

For roughly two-and-a-half hours Monday morning, many users were unable to load the Zoom website; others could neither host nor join scheduled meetings. Zoom fixed the problem by 11:30 a.m. ET, the company said on its status page.

The timing was less than ideal, since many schools across the U.S. were just starting online instruction af...