Zoom's CEO apologizes for its many security issues as daily users balloon to 200 million

Isobel Asher Hamilton

Apr 2, 2020, 16:57 IST

Zoom's CEO apologizes for its many security issues as daily users balloon to 200 million

Carlo Allegri/AP

Video conferencing Zoom has been criticized for privacy and security issues on its platform.
CEO Eric Yuan apologized for the problems in a blog post, saying Zoom wasn't built to handle the number of consumers now using its platform.
Yuan said the firm now has 200 million daily paid and free users, up from 10 million at the end of December.
He announced a series of new measures to help make Zoom more secure, including that he will host a weekly conference to update people on the company's progress.
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Zoom CEO Eric Yuan has apologized for the videoconferencing service's many privacy and security issues, saying it was originally built to service businesses with dedicated IT departments, not millions of consumers.

Zoom offers a video-calling service and has seen usage explode since January, as the coronavirus pandemic forces white-collar employees to work from home.

In a blog post published Wednesday, Yuan said usage had exploded 1900%, with daily free and paying users up from 10 million at the end of December to 200 million in March.

But the increased usage has meant increased targeting by hackers, trolls, and growing scrutiny from the press.

Trolls have taken to "Zoom bombing" meetings, dropping in graphic content and even taunting members of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

Reports also emerged just this week that Zoom was not end-to-end encrypted as it claimed in its marketing materials, and that the company had inadvertently leaked thousands of users' personal emails and photos. The firm was also hit with a class-action lawsuit for allegedly handing data to Facebook.

Yuan apologized for the security issues, noting that most have now been fixed.

"We 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," he wrote.

"We now have a much broader set of users who are utilizing our product in a myriad of unexpected ways, presenting us with challenges we did not anticipate when the platform was conceived."

He added: "We recognize that we have fallen short of the community's - and our own - privacy and security expectations. For that, I am deeply sorry, and I want to share what we are doing about it."