Year in Review: Looking Back at the Huge Year for Zoom

The coronavirus pandemic has changed the way we work, learn and socialize — and Zoom has helped keep us connected through these changes. The video-conferencing platform has been utilized to host work meetings, happy hours, weddings and school classes, and is being used by millions of users who had never even heard of the platform in 2019.

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This boom in popularity has led Zoom stock to soar 569% since the beginning of the year, bringing its market cap to $129 billion as of Sept. 1, CNBC reported. But the company also faced some growing pains this year, with rising privacy concerns and even its own security breach phenomenon known as “Zoom-bombing.” Still, there’s no denying it’s been a banner year for Zoom.

Take a look at the tech company’s huge year.

Following coronavirus-related lockdowns, Zoom became the most-downloaded app in the Apple App Store, CNN reported. On March 23, Zoom was downloaded 2.13 million times worldwide — up from 2.04 million just the day before, according to app tracking firm Apptopia.

Zoom had reached more than 200 million daily meeting participants in March — up from a maximum of 10 million in December 2019, the company said in a blog post.

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As Zoom became the go-to platform for virtual work and social gatherings, it began to face major scrutiny over its privacy in late March. Issues with the platform’s privacy protections were flagged by users, security researchers and even U.S. authorities, CNN reported. On March 30, the FBI warned Zoom users of the “Zoom-bombing” that had been occurring on the platform, with “conferences being disrupted by pornographic and/or hate images and threatening language.”

In an April 1 blog post, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan apologized for the privacy issues users had been experiencing.

“We have strived to provide you with uninterrupted service and the same user-friendly experience that has made Zoom the video-conferencing platform of choice for enterprises around the world, while also ensuring platform safety, privacy, and security,” he wrote. “However, we recognize that we have fallen short of the community’s – and our own – privacy and security expectations. For that, I am deeply sorry.”

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Despite the privacy hiccups, Zoom continued on its meteoric rise. By mid-June, Zoom stocks had soared more than 250%, bringing the company’s value to more than $67 billion — a value greater than 417 of the stocks in the S&P 500 index at the time, CNN reported.

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Following its privacy and security issues, Zoom announced in June that it would begin rolling out end-to-end encryption in beta mode to all of its users the following month, CNN reported. Originally, the company had said that it would only offer the heightened security feature to paying customers — an announcement that was met with backlash.

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Zoom’s financial report for the quarter ending on July 31 showed that its second-quarter total revenue had reached $663.5 million — up 355% year-over-year. In addition, it reported a net profit of $185.7 million for the quarter through July 31 — up nearly 3,300% compared with a year earlier.

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Yuan attributed the strong revenue growth to Zoom’s “ability to keep people around the world connected, coupled with our strong execution.”

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