
Zoom.us had a 700M visitor spike last month - andreitp1
https://twitter.com/slide2subscribe/status/1247515134609838087
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captaincole
While zoom has faced many privacy concerns in the last few weeks, it is
incredible how reliable the service has been given the massive spike in
demand.

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.

~~~
mistersquid
> I know more than a few elementary school teachers who are now hosting zoom
> classes with 15+ 5 year olds on a call.

Given the ease of setup of Zoom which defaulted to a machine-guessable URL
which displayed email and other information about participants, this is one
reason Zoom is rightly being scrutinized and criticized for poor security.

~~~
stri8ed
> Zoom which defaulted to a machine-guessable URL

Was there any rational for them doing this?

~~~
organsnyder
Zoom has clearly focused on UX above all else. This explains both their
popularity and the security issues that have recently been uncovered.

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cs702
That's only http traffic to the website, _not people connecting via the app or
via phone 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.

\--

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

~~~
jlgaddis
> _That 's only http traffic to the website ..._

I suspect a good portion of that 700MM was simply people searching for Zoom to
find out what is was, after hearing about it from others or in the news.

> _Worldwide, I suspect around a couple billion people have recently used
> Zoom._

I recall seeing the number 200MM mentioned and _I think_ that came from Zoom
themselves (a blog post or something, maybe?) but don't hold me to that.

~~~
igammarays
200M daily active users according to their blog post
[https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/04/01/a-message-to-
our-u...](https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/04/01/a-message-to-our-users/)

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crazygringo
I'm legitimately curious if anyone has any clues as to how they handled this
with cloud providers.

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?

~~~
jabart
The public zoom filling showed Zoom had a lot of co-located servers. From
their SEC filing.

"We currently serve our users from 13 co-located data centers in Australia,
Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, India, Japan, the Netherlands and the United
States. We also utilize Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure for the
hosting of certain critical aspects of our business. "

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mu_killnine
As a developer for some sleepy enterprise apps, I am very impressed at how
companies like Zoom, Microsoft, and such can scale to handle this increased
load so gracefully. I'm guessing this is just their website and not their
actual app backend, but I'd imagine they had a huge spike there, too.

~~~
mywittyname
Given enough money, this isn't terribly difficult to accomplish with most
cloud service providers. All of the major players offer automatic scaling
based on load and multiple region support. There are still some gotchas at
scale, but it is much easier to build out scalable infrastructure these days.

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fermienrico
I've commented in the past about Zoom's close ties with China (beyond its
engineering staff) but I didn't have sources, so I conceded and redacted some
specifics:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22738420](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22738420)

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-...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/zoom-ceo-i-really-messed-up-on-security-
as-coronavirus-drove-video-tools-appeal-11586031129)

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.

~~~
fsflover
>> Personal opinion: I think we should all boycott Zoom until there is a
guarantee

There can be no guarantee with a proprietary software. Just switch to free
software...

~~~
fermienrico
Amen.

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ape4
Can they sustain this with so many non-paying users

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bytematic
Does anyone know how they are scaling so gracefully?

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onemoresoop
That's an interesting number and wonder whether this could be traced back to
meeting participants. If so, is it possible to statistically derive the number
of meetings held on average on any day?

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kojeovo
probably more for grocery delivery

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jagger27
The website, sure.

