Zoom Developer Forum

How to fix Zoom Web SDK error “Already has other meetings in progress”?

Amanda Zhu

December 17, 2023

Question

People commonly ask on the Zoom Developer Forum:

We’ve built a bot to join Zoom calls using the Zoom Web SDK.
However, sometimes the bot gets an error that says “Already has other meetings in progress”. At the same time, the bot also gets a popup that says “You are hosting another meeting”.
Our bot only joins meetings as a participant and never as a host. What’s going on?
Error message
Screenshot of pop up that the Zoom bot gets

Answer

We use the Zoom Web SDK to power our bots, and have run into a ton of different edge cases such as this one.

What we’ve experienced is that the “You are hosting another meeting” error message is misleading, as it appears when the actual host is in another meeting, not the bot. The text should say something like “The host is in another meeting”.

The solution we’ve implemented is to detect this specific edge case, and retry the join request on an interval, as we find that in the vast majority of cases, the host is just running late from their previous meeting and will join within a few minutes.

Another option is to use Recall.ai which is a hosted API for meeting bots. This means you don’t need to run the infrastructure, and we also handle all the edge-cases such as this one.

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