On August 24, 2020, the video conferencing and webinar app, Zoom, experienced outages across North America. This ended up disrupting classes and work meetings. The CEO apologized for the inconvenience with a tweet:
It is quite normal for educators to experience difficulties with the app for various reasons. Some of them being unstable internet and slow devices. However, this is the first time a national outage with the actual server has been reported.
Zoom was already a video conferencing app since 2011. It was founded by CEO Eric Yuan and 40 other engineers in 2011. The company was originally Saasbee, Inc. At first, the company was struggling to find investors since there was already so many video-calling services and apps. (Vator Inc.)
The company officially changed its name to Zoom in 2012, and by 2013 it already had 1,000,000 users. Over the years, Zoom became a much more popular app, and its number of users kept growing.
In March 2020, Zoom's popularity skyrocketed. Due to the quarantine, schools and businesses worked from home and met virtually by using the app. One day in March, the app gained 2.13 million downloads. (The Guardian)
By June 2020, the company was worth over 67 billion dollars. (CNN)
Zoom's services are used globally to connect, learn, work, and communicate from the safety of each person's home. The company is definitely facing a lot of pressure since many rely on it.
*Photograph by Stacy
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