Zscaler outage causing heavy packet loss, connectivity issues

A Zscaler service outage is causing loss of connectivity, packet loss, and latency for customers, with no information available as to what is causing the disruption.

The outages occurred at approximately 8 AM EST on Tuesday, with some Zscaler customers on Twitter claiming to be "hard down," while others telling BleepingComputer that they are experiencing heavy latency and packet loss.

Some DCs are working but it's overall shaky situation. We routed road warriors now to certain stable DCs which is the only workaround by now.

— Slobba (@Slobba4) October 25, 2022

#Zscalerdown for sites in SouthAmerica, affecting most countries that uses SaoPaulo as node #zscaler

— JuanPablo Santander (@jpsantander) October 25, 2022

@zscaler makes me sad

I’m going to walk up to the cloud itself and give it a piece of my mind#zscaler

— Jared (new & improved) (@jrodhdog) October 25, 2022

Unfortunately, Zscaler has not indicated any service disruptions in their VPN or connectivity solutions. The company has also not published any new incident reports to its Zscaler Trust site, so customers do not know what is the causing the issues.

BleepingComputer has reached out to Zscaler to learn more and will update this story when more information becomes available.

Update 10/25/22 11:06 PM ET: While BleepingComputer has not received a response from Zscaler, a source shared that an "internal maintenance process" caused a massive disruption to Proxy servers, leading to this outage.

"Early this morning zscalertwo.net cloud was impacted due to an internal maintenance process which affected the VIPs of the ZENs thus bringing down a huge amount of Proxy servers," a source told BleepingComputer.

"The maintenance process had to be rolled back and all the affected ZENs had to be set for reboot. Currently, Operations Team is in the process of bringing all the affected ZENs back online."

Update 10/25/22 12:26 PM ET: Zscaler has confirmed that the disruption was caused by an issue in 'zscalertwo.net Cloud' and that it has now been mitigated.

"The issue has been mitigated. We are currently doing active health check across the cloud and monitoring the situation," reads a incident report on Zscaler Trust.

Update 10/25/22 12:33 PM ET: Zscaler shared the following statement about the outage with BleepingComputer.

"The Zscaler cloud security platform is built using multiple distributed clouds to optimize for performance and resiliency. This specific issue only impacted one of multiple clouds and only one of Zscaler’s service offerings within that cloud. Customers using other Zscaler services within that or other clouds were not impacted. We are also working closely with customers that were impacted. As of 9 am PDT, the vast majority of customers are fully recovered with post validation checks to be completed within 30-60 minutes." - Zscaler.