KEY POINTS

  • The exponential growth of Zoom usage has brought headaches with it, especially "Zoombombing," which has disrupted everything from family meals to elementary school classes
  • The company has pledged to fix issues in the next three months and to keep users updated
  • Zoom has seen its share price nearly double since the beginning of the year and is now worth $34.7 billion

 

Coronavirus has proved a boon for Zoom Video Conferencing, ballooning its number of users to more than 200 million as families conduct virtual meals, fitness instructors conduct virtual classes, teachers virtually engage their students and others discover ways of staying in touch amid lockdowns to stem spread of the pandemic.

As of Friday morning, more than 1.6 million infections have been confirmed worldwide with more than 97,200 deaths.

For Zoom, it has meant a 2,000% increase in usage this year with all the attendant concerns: worries about privacy and efforts to fight “Zoombombing,” the latest hack to disrupt communication in the digital age, featuring intruders shouting obscenities or trying to show pornography to meeting participants.

“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,” Zoom founder and CEO Eric S. Yuan said 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.”

Yuan pledged to develop a freeze feature; seek advice from cybersecurity experts; provide transparency on data, records and content; enhance its bug bounty program; launch an industrywide collaborative chief information security officer council; engage in a series of simultaneous “white box penetration tests,” and beginning next week, host a weekly webinar on Wednesdays at 10 a.m. PDT (1 p.m. EST) to provide updates on privacy and security issues.

Zoom’s exponential growth has made Hong Kong’s richest man even richer. Li Ka-shing, who built his $25.7 billion fortune in real estate and infrastructure, owns 8.6% of Zoom through three investment vehicles. His stake has surged 80% and now is worth about $3 billion, Bloomberg reported.

Overall, Zoom (ZM) is worth $34.7 billion, its share prices nearly doubled since Jan. 1, trading at $124.51 in late morning Friday.

RELATED STORIES
Coronavirus Video