Eric Yuan, Zoom founder, on the Zoom blog:

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. 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.

That’s amazing growth. Zoom has made Yuan one of the world’s richest people.

But Zoom is beset by security issues, with reports of attacks that can take over Windows machines and Macs, and lots of trolling Zoom-bombing (where an uninvited person joins a conference, frequently harassing the rest of the attendees).

Continuing:

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.

Read the rest of the post for all the details. This feels like about as good of a response as we could have hoped for. Feels like the team got in over their head, were not prepared for this growth, did not anticipate the security issues that have emerged.

A big black eye for Zoom. Let’s see if they can recover. In the meantime, here are some alternatives.