Most services would have buckled (examples abound like robinhoods recent outage) and part of their stack would have not been able to handle the load.

On top of that they are in new customer segments that I bet they didn’t see as their user base. I know more than a few elementary school teachers who are now hosting zoom classes with 15+ 5 year olds on a call.

Most people use only the app or a phone call, for example to join a conference call hosted by someone else. Beyond business people on company-hosted calls, think students taking remote classes, grandmas connecting with their whole families, friends joining virtual happy hours, people playing social games, and so on.

Worldwide, I wouldn't be shocked to find out that a couple billion people have recently used Zoom.

Zoom has handled this ludicrous growth impressively well.

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EDIT: Changed "suspect" to "wouldn't be shocked to find out," which more accurately reflects what I meant to write.

Technically it doesn't seem that hard -- just spin up a ton more servers. Unlike Facebook or Twitter or Reddit there isn't massive communication between all users at all times -- just one-off video calls that are "relatively" trivial to distribute among servers. (Sure there's cloud recording and stuff too, but the point still stands that this is certainly among the way easier products to scale.)

But assuming they're using cloud providers, I'm curious what percentage of spare cloud capacity they've wound up taking? If they've had to split up traffic between multiple major providers just to handle it?

Or if the increase is well within the capacity of any single cloud provider to handle easily, e.g. massive daytime spikes are essentially just using the same servers Netflix uses at night?

WSJ just wrote an article interviewing the CEO and other security experts on this topic. Some interesting excerpts:

> In the U.S., 27 attorney general’s offices have raised questions about privacy issues, Zoom said, adding it is cooperating with authorities.

> Security researchers also have scrutinized Zoom’s links to China. Researchers at the Citizen Lab, a security research group affiliated with the University of Toronto, on Friday said Zoom used an encryption technology that is considered substandard, and that in certain circumstances the company stored encryption keys—long strings of numbers and characters that can be used to access encoded communications—on servers based in China.

> Brendan Ittelson, head of technical support at Zoom, said because of the distributed nature of the company’s infrastructure, meeting data can be routed through different data centers around the world. Zoom’s system first tries to send this data locally, but if the connections fail, the backup route might send it elsewhere.

> Zoom had created a system to prevent this data from being sent through China when calls originate in the U.S. But when traffic surged starting in February, some data was mistakenly routed that way, the company said, adding that it has remedied the problem. Critics also have questioned whether Zoom’s heavy reliance on China-based engineering could pose a security risk.

Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/zoom-ceo-i-really-messed-up-on-...

Personal opinion: I think we should all boycott Zoom until there is a guarantee of where the data is stored with independent audits. In this pandemic, we've given our privacy (facial features, email, screen sharing, video data and application usage patterns) to Zoom in a whim. The entire world has done so. I have no trust in the Chinese Communist Party and their potential to exploit this data if they get it. Perhaps not in the immediate future, but may be in year 2027 - suppressing voices, threats and border control, detentions of people who spoke against the CCP during the pandemic or after caught using the facial AI technologies from the data collected today. This is real and we should all be concerned.