Where Did All Your Zoom Friends Go?

One day last year, Julie Gauthier went on Twitter with a confession to make. “Unpopular opinion: I don’t have zoom fatigue and I miss zoom happy hours and game nights,” she wrote. “I feel more isolated now than I did when friends all took time to chat online at the beginning of the pandemic.”

Ms. Gauthier, 30, had been scrolling through old photos and found a screenshot of one of the virtual happy hours she’d had with friends in the early days of Covid restrictions. At the time, living alone and working remotely as a software engineer in rural Coventry, Conn., the self-described extrovert seized every opportunity for human contact she could get.

Virtual trivia nights? She was in. Mask-making over Zoom with members of a local makerspace? Why not? She made a new best friend out of a stranger she met at an online meetup for tech workers, and when another friend’s band began broadcasting porch concerts over Facebook Live, Ms. Gauthier streamed the show on her TV and got all dressed up as if she were there.

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By the time she stumbled on the old Zoom screenshot — filled with the faces of friends she had scarcely seen since — it felt decidedly less so. It still does.

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Three years since the pandemic was declared, many of the apps, platforms and digital tools that Ms. Gauthier and millions of others relied on to stay connected are struggling, shrinking or shutting down. Zoom has slashed 15 percent of its work force. Epic Games killed off the group video app Houseparty in late 2021, and even Meta’s Portal devices, which after years of challenges surged in popularity in 2020, got the ax last year.