The holidays are stressful enough during a normal year. Cooking a giant turkey plus what feels like a million sides. Traveling for hours in atrocious freeway traffic, or battling TSA lines at the airport. The CDC is recommending you cut the travel this year to prevent the spread of covid-19 and, well, if you break out into tears over dry mashed potatoes when you’re really sad about not getting to see your favorite niece or uncle, no one would blame you. Trying to connect with family virtually can be a logistical and technological nightmare tomorrow for some—but in an attempt to ease some of that stress, Zoom is lifting its 40-minute cap tomorrow so you can talk to family and friends for as long as you want.
Zoom users won’t need to do anything on their end, either. Just log-in and connect to a session. If you’re an educator or someone in another profession who hasn’t had to deal with the 40-minute cap for the school year so far, nothing changes for you—except maybe being the one to coordinate and host the Zoom session.
The cap lifts on November 26, 12 am ET, and goes back into effect on November 27, 6 am ET. Here’s the same in a few other time zones:
- PT: November 25, 9 pm - November 27, 3 am
- GMT: November 26, 5 am - November 27, 11 am
- CEST: November 26, 6 am - November 27, 12 pm
- CST: November 26, 1 pm - November 27, 7 pm
- AEDT: November 26, 4 pm - November 27, 10 pm
- IST: November 26, 10:30 am - November 27, 4:30 pm
Of course, there are other video conferencing tools that you can use for free, like Google Meet and Skype. But Zoom has quickly become the most popular thanks to its easy-t0-navigate interface and the massive amount of people it can host in a single session. Not to mention schools were early adopters of the program. Just remember to passcode and create a waiting room for your virtual Thanksgiving get-together. No one likes a Zoombomber.