- Zoom founder & CEO Eric S. Yuan revealed that the company has seen its daily users increase from 10 million to 200 million in 3 months. And the company had to reassess its security features right away.
Due to the social distancing aspect of dealing with the COVID-19 outbreak, one of the fastest-growing tech companies has been video conferencing company Zoom Video Communications. And this past week, Zoom Video Communications founder & CEO Eric S. Yuan acknowledged that the company had to reassess its privacy and security features.
At the same time, Zoom Video had to scale up its engineering resources to account for going to an average of 10 million daily users to 200 million daily users in 3 months.
“Usage of Zoom has ballooned overnight – far surpassing what we expected when we first announced our desire to help in late February. This includes over 90,000 schools across 20 countries that have taken us up on our offer to help children continue their education remotely,” wrote Yuan in a blog post. “To put this growth in context, as of the end of December last year, the maximum number of daily meeting participants, both free and paid, conducted on Zoom was approximately 10 million. In March this year, we reached more than 200 million daily meeting participants, both free and paid. We have been working around the clock to ensure that all of our users – new and old, large and small – can stay in touch and operational.”
Zoom had originally built its platform primarily for enterprise customers and large institutions with full IT supports. And thousands of enterprises around the world had conducted exhaustive security reviews of the company’s user, network, and data center layers. After scrutinizing the product, they had selected Zoom for complete deployment.
And Zoom did not design the product with the foresight that in a matter of weeks, every person in the world would suddenly be working, studying, and socializing from home.
With the sudden jump in users, Zoom has been offering training sessions and tutorials as well as offering free interactive daily webinars to users. And the company is also taking steps to minimize customer support wait times.
On March 20, Zoom published a blog post to help users address incidents of harassment (known as Zoombombing). About a week later, Zoom removed the Facebook SDK in its iOS client to prevent it from collecting unnecessary device information from its users. And two days later, Zoom updated the privacy policy to be more clear about the data it collects and how it is used.
Recently, Zoom launched a guide for administrators to set up virtual classrooms. The settings for education were changed so virtual waiting rooms were turned on by default. And on April 1, Zoom published a blog post to clarify the facts around encryption on the platform. Over the next 90 days, Zoom will be enabling stronger security measures and launch a CISO council in partnership with leading CISOs from across the industry to facilitate ongoing dialogue regarding security and privacy best practices.
