Zoom was a popular online conferencing application before COVID-19 infected the world, but the pandemic drove usage of the service to astronomical levels. Before the virus spread, the platform garnered about 10 million meeting participants a day. By March, that number was 200 million a day.

“[W]e did not design the product with the foresight that, in a matter of weeks, every person in the world would suddenly be working, studying and socializing from home,” confessed Zoom CEO Eric S. Yuan in a company blog. “We now have a much broader set of users who are utilizing our product in a myriad of [sic] unexpected ways, presenting us with challenges we did not anticipate when the platform was conceived,” he added.