At the peak of use of the Zoom meeting platform on Wednesday, there was a malfunction that caused outages across the country, and it delayed the hiring of a former Heisman Trophy-winner and NBA veteran. Around 2:30PM, users began reporting outages. Nearly 60,000 users of the platform were affected by the outage that would not allow connection to the server.
Among the meetings that was directly impactful of the HBCU world, the Florida A&M Board of Trustees was supposed to meet at 3:00PM to discuss the contract offered to new head men’s basketball coach prospect Charlie Ward and to receive an update of the university’s presidential search.
FAMU’s BOT meeting would have easily drawn hundreds of viewers via Zoom and other methods. The vote on coaching prospect Charlie Ward is a very hot topic around campus, the HBCU world and the greater basketball world. Because it was a vote by the FAMU BOT that was ultimately responsible for the departure of former coach Patrick Crarey II. Crarey was seeking a multi-year contract, but the FAMU BOT would not approve of the contract. In the end, the dissension was too much for Crarey. Even though Vice President and Director of Athletics Angela Suggs, according to sources was able to counteroffer Crarey, the mental damage had been done.
Rattler fans will have to wait until the announced re-scheduling of the trustees meeting to push the former NBA player’s contract forward. State of Florida law requires there to be advanced notice to the general public, which is why the Zoom outage caused such a disruption.
According to the State of Florida Sunshine Law, which aims to make meetings open and accessible to the public, section 202 (notice of Meeting) states, “ b) Reasonable notice of a regular meeting of the Board shall be made one (1) week before the meeting is scheduled to take place.” In this instance, the BOT meeting will have to wait at least a week until it can be rescheduled and noticed to the public.
The disruption of the Zoom video conferencing platform that grew its popularity during the covid pandemic, experienced a global outage. The company vigorously began troubleshooting the issue and by 500PM, it announced on Twitter (X) that it had resolved the issue. The outage affected the Web site, the app, and web-based operation.
Curiously, there was also an outage with the popular music streaming platform Spotify today. That issue was solved pretty quickly as well, with all services being restored in short order. The two outages were unrelated.