Zoom is taking a lot of measures to stop the growing concerns of security issues in a Zoom meeting and to prevent Zoom Bombing scenarios. The latest action by the company is to disable the ability to join a Zoom meeting as a guest from the Zoom web client.

Participants of a Zoom meeting are now required to sign in with their account to be able to join a Zoom meeting from the zoom.us/join web client.

This doesn’t affect the Zoom app for Desktop and Mobile. You could still join a meeting as a guest without signing in from the Zoom app on your computer or mobile. It’s for the web app only that you have to sign up to join a meeting.

No matter how you may have received the invitation, by Email with meeting ID and password, or an invite join a Zoom meeting with a link, you still need to sign in to zoom.us to be able to join a meeting from the web app.

Do I Need to Sign Up to Join a Zoom Meeting?

Zoom hasn’t completely disabled the ability to join a meeting as a guest without signing up for a Zoom account. You could still use the Zoom app on your computer or your iPhone or Android device to join a meeting as a guest.

Here’s a guide to download and install Zoom app on your Windows PC to quickly join a meeting.

Open the Zoom Download Center link in a web browser on your computer and click the ‘Download’ button below the ‘Zoom Client for Meetings’ section to get the Zoom app installer file.

Run the ‘ZoomInstaller.exe’ file that you downloaded in the step above from the Downloads folder on your computer.

The Zoom installer will begin the installation without further input and automatically open the Zoom window on your PC after finishing the installation.

If the Zoom app doesn’t open automatically, search for it in the Start menu and launch it from there.

The main screen of the Zoom app will give you two options: ‘Join a meeting’ and ‘Sign in’.

To join a meeting as a guest without signing in, click the ‘Join a Meeting’ button in the app.

Then, enter the ‘meeting ID’ and your name in the respective fields on the window, and then click the ‘Join’ button.

When prompted to enter meeting password, use the password you received in the invitation mail and click the ‘Join Meeting’ button.

💡 In case you received an invitation link to join the meeting. Then here’s how you can find the Meeting ID and Password from the invitation link.

A Zoom meeting invitation link looks like this:

https://zoom.us/j/481635725?pwd=TDJmVVdqSnJhaFBZGjYoBVZkUkJadz09

The series of numbers (in bold) zoom.us/j/481635725? in the link is the meeting ID.

And the string of characters (in bold) after the pwd= part is the password you can use to join the meeting.
zoom.us/j/481635725?pwd=TDJmVVdqSnJhaFBZGjYoBVZkUkJadz09

Hence, the meeting ID and password for the above example would be:

  • Meeting ID: 481635725
  • Password: TDJmVVdqSnJhaFBZGjYoBVZkUkJadz09
    👆 Do NOT try to use the above-mentioned meeting ID and password to join the meeting. It won’t work.

This way you can still join a meeting as a guest while the Zoom web client is disallowing it. If you frequently use Zoom, we recommend you continue using the Zoom app as it offers more features than the web app.