bogus zoom message at startup - contact your IT department to update

[Eegam]

We had a problem today with Zoom, my wife runs training with some done online, and is all setup on Zoom, been doing it for years - she uses other platforms for other customers but zoom has been her preferred choice - up until today. Today we struck a landmine planted by the Zoom techo's that caused major problems in her business, it was a failure of the Zoom product. 

To force an app update before proceeding into a scheduled meeting is annoying but its something that the Zoom business seems to accept as something they can force on their customers who are trying to get into a meeting on time / rather than doing a little more tech work and allowing customers to do the update after the meeting they are going into right now. This happens a lot. 

Today however, we get the message do an update - then it says that we are not authorised to do the update and have to get our IT department to do it. This sends us into a spin, paying clients are logging into this meeting, zoom was tested as working fine in the normal pre meeting check, and now go to log back in and Zoom has (by choice of zoom tech) locked us out mandating an update but not allowing us to do the update with a message that makes no sense - we are the owner/admin and dont have an IT department. 

After trying to sort things out I finally found a note on Zoom support saying that the message can occur due to some bad environment on the PC when it was installed (its been running for a couple of years) and to uninstal and reinstall Zoom (this fixed it but broke a whole lot of the customer things needed in the days meeting). We were into the training session 30 minutes late.

What a dissappointing load of rubbish to have as a support message and maybe a sign that Zoom are on the down, its obviously a known issue but rather than own it to simplify the customer experience they say that a product that is installed directly from a link on their website fails randomly due to something thats nothing to do with them. 

This sort of unexpected failure is a risk for any business, having a tool thats needs to work do something in this way implies it could do it anytime in the future. Is anyone else having this problem - any ideas how we can avoid having it happen again ?