Zscaler

Zscaler was built on a premise that ran contrary to the prevailing security architecture of its founding year: the corporate network perimeter was already obsolete. Jay Chaudhuri founded the company in 2007 arguing that security inspection should live in the cloud, in line with traffic flows, rather than being forced back through a physical data centre for inspection. Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA) proxies all user internet traffic through Zscaler's globally distributed cloud, applying URL filtering, SSL inspection, sandboxing, data loss prevention, and threat prevention in the cloud before traffic reaches its destination. This proxy-native architecture has made Zscaler one of the central players in the zero trust network access category.

The Zscaler client connector — formerly called the ZScaler App — runs on endpoints and tunnels all internet traffic to the nearest Zscaler point of presence. With over 150 data centres globally, the design ensures low-latency inspection regardless of user location. The ZIA Admin portal controls internet access policies, the Zscaler Private Access (ZPA) component handles zero trust access to internal applications, and the Zscaler Digital Experience (ZDX) product provides end-to-end performance monitoring from the user's device through the cloud to the destination. These components share a common cloud infrastructure and account system, making Zscaler's cloud platform a critical dependency for organisations that have fully adopted the proxy architecture.

Zscaler service disruptions have a distinctive blast radius. When ZIA is degraded, all proxied internet traffic either fails to reach its destination or, depending on policy configuration, bypasses inspection entirely in fail-open mode — a security posture risk that IT teams must manage actively. SSL inspection failures appear as certificate errors in users' browsers for traffic that should be transparently intercepted. The client connector may fail to authenticate to the cloud, leaving endpoints without proxy enforcement and generating a flood of connection failure notifications from the tray icon. Policy changes published through the ZIA admin console fail to propagate when the management backend is under load, leaving pending rule changes stuck in a draft state.

Outage.gg tracks Zscaler Internet Access service status using real-time community reports from network engineers and security administrators. If ZIA is degraded, the client connector is failing, or policies are not propagating, the live status page shows current impact from the Zscaler user community.