Many applicant tracking systems do struggle with tables, but the honest answer is more nuanced than a flat yes or no, and understanding why helps you make better formatting decisions than a blanket rule would.
Why tables and columns cause parsing problems in the first place
An ATS reads your resume as a stream of text, extracted in a specific reading order, not as the visual layout you see on screen. When your resume uses a table, the underlying parsing technology has to guess how to read it, and it often reads row by row instead of the way a human eye would naturally scan the page. This can scramble job titles, dates, and bullet points into a sequence that no longer makes sense once extracted. The same underlying problem affects multi column layouts and text boxes, since anything that departs from a single, linear document structure risks the same kind of misread.
It is not uniformly fatal, but you cannot know which system you are dealing with
Parsing technology has genuinely improved over the years, and some modern systems handle simple, well structured tables and even some column layouts reasonably well. But you have no way of knowing which specific ATS a given company uses, or how well configured that particular instance is. Since the cost of guessing wrong is your resume becoming unreadable before a human ever sees it, and the cost of playing it safe is essentially zero, the calculation strongly favors caution.
What playing it safe actually means: a single column layout, standard section headers such as Experience, Education, and Skills, and plain bullet points formatted with the tool's native bullet function, not visual symbols typed manually. This is a less visually distinctive resume than a template built around tables and colored columns, but it is the version most likely to be read correctly by whatever system is doing the initial screening.
How to check your own resume
Beyond using a dedicated ATS checker, a simple manual test is to open your resume file and try to select all the text with a click and drag or a select all command, then paste it into a plain text document. If the resulting text reads in a logical order, roughly the order a human would read it in, that is a reasonably good sign. If the pasted text is jumbled, with dates and job titles out of sequence or mixed together, that is a strong signal that an ATS would have the same trouble.
What to use instead
Standard headings, a single column, and plain bullet points remain the most reliable choice. It is a formatting decision that trades some visual distinctiveness for a meaningfully higher chance that your actual content, the experience and skills you worked hard to build, gets read correctly by whatever software stands between you and a human recruiter.