Recurring Zoom

There’s nothing quite like the panic that sets in when you think you’ve destroyed a Zoom meeting that you’re using in a dozen upcoming coffee chats. Of course I did this about 10 minutes the next coffee chat so the person joining was extra confused. Shout out to Chanel Rene for helping me unravel what I’d done.

During one of my previous coffee chats it occurred to me that if I had them back-to-back that it was probable that the next guest would arrive before the current guest left. Trying to avoid awkwardness I made a note to enable the “lobby” feature on all my recurring meetings.

I was just about to take my next meeting on my phone and remembered I wanted to adjust it and decided it made sense to try and squeeze it in in the 5 minutes before I needed to use it (ooh, foreshadowing). I didn’t notice at first, but after adjusting the feature and saving the meeting again it had disappeared from my list. I went on and adjusted the second one and it too disappeared from my list.

Oh no… what have I done?

Now I had no way to launch my next meeting from my phone and headed to my calendar in a panic to click the link there. That worked, but evidently it also told my guest that the meeting was scheduled for 3 months ago.

Here’s what a healthy recurring meeting looks like in the mobile app:

This is what it looks like when you try to edit that same meeting in the mobile app. Notice that it immediately tries to set the date and time on it. The screenshot only shows a date in the future because I manually adjusted it to fix the problem, but originally it set it back to when the recurring meeting was first created in the desktop app.

Finally, after finding my missing meetings by going through the past meetings section of the Zoom website and setting their dates to the future I was able to load each meeting up in the desktop app and set them to recurring again.

TL;DR: Don’t edit recurring Zoom meetings in the mobile app. They’ll break and wind up non-recurring meetings in the past. Use the desktop app.