How Did The Zoom Outage Affect These Computing ETFs?

For a society that has come to rely heavily on at-home and virtual work, Zoom has become crucial to an increasing number of workers and students. That’s why an outage like what happened on Monday, where many students were starting the first day of school, was particularly difficult for students, employees, and investors.

While the problem was prevalent throughout many parts of the globe, in the United States, the problem began in the East Coast early Monday and continued to burgeon as that day continued.

“We have received reports of users being unable to visit the Zoom website (zoom.us) and unable to start and join Zoom Meetings and Webinars,” the company said in a statement Monday morning. “We are currently investigating and will provide updates as we have them.”

In Georgia and California, the outage plagued public school students on their first day back. Atlanta Public Schools sent out a tweet saying it was attempting to handle the problem.

Fortunately, Zoom said all of its services are currently operational following the morning outage.

“We have resolved the issue causing users to be unable to start and join Zoom Meetings and Webinars. Users are now also able to sign up for paid accounts, upgrade, and manage their service on the Zoom website. We are currently monitoring to ensure that these services are operational,” the company said on its website.

The videoconferencing company has become a staple service during the coronavirus pandemic. With it challenging or impossible for businesses and schools to meet in person, based on restrictions and regulations,, enterprises and institutions have transitioned toward using software that permits virtual meetings, something that may become a fixture even after the pandemic according to some experts.

“Physically connecting with someone actually takes a lot of time, emissions, and energy when most of what is accomplished in a meeting can happen over Slack or a Zoom call. The time you save and how much more you can get done in a day may surprise you,” wrote Adam Benzion in a report on fastcompany.com.

The videoconferencing company does not share user numbers, but analysts from Bernstein estimated in June that its mobile app had 173 million monthly active users as of May 27, an increase from 14 million on March 4, per data from analytics firm Apptopia.

What’s almost more impressive is that the company’s stock has surged over 300% year to date. However, Zoom stock was down more than 2% in afternoon trading Monday.

For investors looking at ETFs that have exposure to Zoom, they can start with a technology and e-commerce-focused fund like the Kevin O’Leary-sponsored Global Internet Giants ETF (OGIG)—OGIG debuted in the markets in June 2018 and has been offering investors access to a wide variety of both domestic and international stocks. The ETF gained on Monday despite Zoom news.

Another fund to check out is the WisdomTree Cloud Computing Fund (WCLD), which also has Zoom exposure. WCLD seeks to track the price and yield performance of the BVP Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index, which is designed to track the performance of emerging public companies primarily involved in providing cloud computing software and services to their customers. WCLD dropped almost 1% on Monday.

For more market trends, visit  ETF Trends.

How Did The Zoom Outage Affect These Computing ETFs?

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