Zoom’s Domain Outage Was a Wake-Up Call. Here’s What It Means for the Future of Domain Registrars.

On April 16, 2025, Zoom went down. Not because of a DDoS attack. Not because of some misconfigured DNS record. Not because someone hacked them.

Nope—Zoom went down because of a domain issue. Yes, the Zoom. A global communications platform relied on by governments, financial institutions, hospitals, and classrooms… brought to a halt because of a registrar-level error involving its zoom.us domain.

Now, let’s unpack why that happened—and more importantly, what this tells us about a massive gap in the domain name industry that no one’s talking about.

First, What Actually Happened?

Zoom’s domain zoom.us was temporarily placed on a serverHold status. Translation: the domain was essentially frozen at the registry level.

This happened due to a miscommunication or error in coordination between MarkMonitor (Zoom’s corporate registrar) and GoDaddy Registry, which operates the .us TLD.

The result?

• Zoom’s meetings stopped working.

• Their main website went down.

• Users across the world were locked out of one of the most relied-upon platforms of the decade.

The outage lasted almost two hours. And it sent a message louder than any PR statement could:

Your domain registrar is part of your uptime stack.

The Role of a Registrar Has Changed. Most Haven’t.

Traditionally, registrars were treated as low-touch service providers. You buy a domain, you set your nameservers, and you don’t think about them again.

That model worked fine—until now.

Today, a domain name is infrastructure. For companies like Zoom, Stripe, Slack, and countless others, the domain is the platform.

And yet, most registrars still act like retail storefronts.

No real-time monitoring.

No SLAs tailored for mission-critical services.

No failover protocols.

No proactive account support.

No urgency.

And in Zoom’s case, that led to a global outage.

The Real Problem: We Don’t Have a Next-Gen Business Registrar

Let’s say it clearly:

There is no truly next-gen business-focused domain registrar in the market right now.

MarkMonitor, GoDaddy, and a few others offer “enterprise” support—but that usually means longer onboarding and more paperwork, not smarter tech or better uptime guarantees.

Nobody has rethought what a registrar should be for the cloud-first, API-driven, always-on era.

We have cloud-native everything—except registrars.

What Should a Next-Gen Business Registrar Look Like?

Here’s what a registrar built for mission-critical operations should offer by default:

• Real-time domain status monitoring with automated alerts

• Instant hold detection and escalation protocols

• Dedicated domain security infrastructure with built-in abuse flagging

• ICANN and registry-specific policy auditing tools

• Redundant registrar access or emergency overrides

• 24/7 human response team (not a support ticket queue)

This isn’t luxury. This is table stakes if your domain is your business.

This is a Market-Wide Opportunity

The Zoom incident wasn’t isolated.

It was just the one that happened to a company big enough to make the headlines.

But if it can happen to them—with an expensive corporate registrar and a mature DNS setup—it can happen to anyone.

And right now, there’s no registrar pushing forward with this vision: a domain infrastructure partner for high-stakes businesses, platforms, and institutions.

The tools exist. The protocols can be built. The demand is already here.

What's missing?Someone willing to build outside the box.

Final Thought

Zoom’s outage didn’t just expose a registrar failure. It exposed an industry-wide blind spot.

We’ve built incredible innovation across SaaS, DevOps, cloud infrastructure, security, and APIs. But we left the registrar model stuck in 2004.

If you're a brand, you can’t afford to treat your domain like a $10/year asset.

And if you're in the domain industry, this is your moment to rethink what registrar excellence actually looks like.

Because uptime doesn’t start at the server anymore. It starts at the domain.

Want to build the future of domain infrastructure or looking for a registrar that actually thinks like a business partner?