The chief executive officer of Zoom, Eric Yuan, has issued an apology to users as the video teleconferencing platform faces increased scrutiny from law enforcement and security experts.
The company said user volume jumped as social-distancing measures moved businesses and schools to meet online. Zoom said its maximum number of daily meeting participants increased from about 10 million at the end of December to 200 million in March.
The company promised to freeze work on other features and focus entirely on privacy for 90 days. It also said it was enhancing its bounty program for users who report vulnerabilities, conducting a comprehensive security review, and preparing a transparency report.
“For the past several weeks, supporting this influx of users has been a tremendous undertaking and our sole focus,” Yuan said in a post on the company’s blog. “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.”
Earlier this week, New York Attorney General Letitia James sent a letter to the company requesting what new security steps it was taking after a series of incidents where hackers interrupted teleconferences. The company was also accused of improperly sharing data with Facebook and failing to accurately describe its encryption practices.
Yuan said the platform was primarily built for enterprise customers that do security reviews and have full IT support. “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 said.
Shares of Zoom were down as much as 16% on Thursday morning. They were down more than 10% in early afternoon trading.
Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images