Zoom Launches — Video Meetings From a WebEx Engineer

Zoom Meetings, the video-conferencing service, was first released to the public in 2013. Zoom's 2019 IPO prospectus lists its milestones year by year: 2011 for the founding of the company, its first employee, first seed funding and first office; 2013 for the first public release of Zoom Meetings, which by the end of that year supported 200 million annual meeting minutes. According to Wikipedia, version 1.0, which raised the limit to 25 participants per meeting, came out on 25 January 2013.

A Founder From WebEx

Zoom's founder, Eric Yuan, came from an earlier video-conferencing company. According to the prospectus, Yuan worked at WebEx Communications from August 1997, finishing as vice president of engineering. After Cisco Systems acquired WebEx in May 2007 he served as Cisco's corporate vice president of engineering until June 2011—the same month he became Zoom's chairman, president and chief executive.

The company itself was registered slightly earlier. A 2024 certificate of amendment records that its original certificate of incorporation was filed in Delaware on 21 April 2011, under the name Saasbee, Inc.

2019: The IPO

Zoom went public in April 2019 at $36.00 a share, listing on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol ZM. CNBC reported on 18 April that the stock rose 72% on its first day of trading. The prospectus showed revenue growth of 118% in the fiscal year ended January 2019, with net income of $7.6 million for that year.

March 2020: 200 Million

In 2020, as schools and offices moved online during the coronavirus pandemic, Zoom's usage jumped by an order of magnitude. In "A Message to Our Users", published on 1 April, Yuan wrote that at the end of December 2019 the maximum number of daily meeting participants, free and paid, had been approximately 10 million; in March 2020 Zoom reached more than 200 million. The same message said more than 90,000 schools in 20 countries were using the company's offer to help children keep learning remotely.

The metric needs care. Daily meeting participants count a person once for every meeting they join—someone in five meetings in a day counts five times—so it is not a number of users. The Verge reported on 30 April that Zoom's blog post of 22 April had claimed more than 300 million daily users, and that Zoom then acknowledged the correct figure was more than 300 million daily meeting participants, which it had unintentionally referred to as "users" and "people".

All three are Zoom's own figures. In its financial results, revenue for the fiscal year ended January 2021 was $2,651.4 million, up 326% year over year.

Zoombombing and Encryption

In the same weeks the problems surfaced. One was "Zoombombing": TechCrunch's report of 3 April 2020 described malicious people entering Zoom calls and disrupting them, for example by screen-sharing offensive imagery. From 5 April Zoom required a password to enter meetings joined by meeting ID and turned waiting rooms on by default, so hosts had to admit attendees one by one.

The other was encryption. In a report on 3 April, Citizen Lab found that although Zoom's documentation claimed AES-256 where possible, each meeting actually used a single AES-128 key in ECB mode shared by all participants, and that keys were sometimes delivered through servers in China even when all participants and the subscriber's company were outside China. It concluded that Zoom did not implement true end-to-end encryption.

The 90-Day Plan

Yuan's 1 April message apologised and set out a 90-day plan:

• A feature freeze, moving engineers onto trust, safety and privacy issues
• A review of new consumer use cases with third-party experts and representative users
• A transparency report on requests for data, records or content
• An enhanced bug bounty programme
• A CISO council of industry security leaders
• Simultaneous white-box penetration tests by third parties
• A weekly Wednesday webinar in which Yuan would report on privacy and security

On 14 October Zoom announced that end-to-end encryption (E2EE) would be available as a technical preview from the following week. Free and paid users could host up to 200 participants in an E2EE meeting, with the keys generated on the host's device so that Zoom's servers never saw them. In this first phase some features, including cloud recording, breakout rooms and polling, would be unavailable.

The FTC Order

On 9 November 2020 the Federal Trade Commission announced a settlement with Zoom. The FTC alleged that since at least 2016 Zoom had told users it offered "end-to-end, 256-bit encryption" when it provided a lower level of security and held the cryptographic keys that could give it access to meeting content; that it had said cloud recordings were encrypted immediately after a meeting ended when some were stored unencrypted for up to 60 days; and that a July 2018 Mac update had secretly installed a web server that bypassed a Safari safeguard.

The settlement required a comprehensive information security programme, biennial assessments by an independent third party and a ban on misrepresenting its privacy and security practices. The announcement did not describe a monetary penalty.

Zoom in 2026

On 25 November 2024 the company changed its name from Zoom Video Communications, Inc. to Zoom Communications, Inc. Its results of 25 February 2026 put revenue for the fiscal year ended January 2026 at $4,868.8 million, up 4.4%—single-digit growth after the 326% of the pandemic year. Revenue for the second quarter of fiscal 2027, reported on 25 August 2026, was $1,277.2 million, up 4.9% year over year, and Yuan remained founder and chief executive.

For the beginning of renting computing as a service, also on the cloud timeline, see Amazon S3.