How do I pause the entire Zoom meeting if there's a problem?

As the host or co-host of a Zoom meeting, you can quickly suspend all activity if something disruptive happens and you need to take a moment to figure out who caused the disruption, and to regroup and take action.

Click the "Security" icon in the Zoom toolbar and choose "Suspend Participant Activities"

Click "Suspend" with the "Report to Zoom" checkbox checked to report the incident to Zoom

NOTE: Once you suspend all activities participants will still be in the meeting, but the following will be disabled for them: video, audio, profile pictures, renaming, content sharing, and chat. The meeting will also be temporarily locked, so no new participants can join.

IMPORTANT: if you have breakout rooms open, you must close them by clicking the "Breakout Rooms" icon in the Zoom toolbar, and choosing "Close All Rooms"

NOTE: "Suspend all participant activities" only works on activities in the main room of the Zoom meeting. If students and other participants are in breakout rooms when you suspend activities, the breakout rooms will remain open, and audio and video for people in those rooms will still work, meaning they can still talk and show their webcam video.

For this reason, when suspending all participant activities, the host or co-host must close the breakout rooms as shown above, to bring everyone back to the main room so their activities will be suspended there.

In the Zoom Report window choose "I'll tell you later" and click "Submit"

In the Zoom toolbar unmute yourself and start your own video so you can communicate with your participants

Take a minute to let your students and other participants know what has happened, to tell them that the disruptive behavior was unacceptable, and to apologize. Tell them you are taking steps to secure the meeting, and ask them to standby for a few minutes.

This gives you time to make decisions about what to do next, including identifying and ejecting any remaining disruptive participants.

See: How do I eject a person from my Zoom class meeting?

Once the meeting has been secured, decide which aspects you want to re-enable. Announce to your participants that you are re-starting features of the meeting. Enable the features in the "Security" menu.

If you are comfortable doing so, you can now re-enable such features as "Unmute Themselves", "Start Video", "Chat", "Share Screen", "Rename Themselves".

You can also uncheck "Hide Profile Pictures" so that people's profile pictures become visible again.

Please report any instances of classroom-related Zoom-bombing to Tufts Educational Technology Services at [email protected].