The video-conferencing company Zoom is facing a class-action suit filed on Tuesday accusing it of overstating its privacy standards and failing to disclose that its service was not end-to-end encrypted. Zoom has been frantically rushing to fix various security issues while signing up millions of new users from around the world as people are forced to work from home after lockdowns were enforced to slow the spread of the coronavirus. “They have lost nearly a third of their—market value since touching record highs in late-March,” says Reuters in its report today on the lawsuit. Zoom’s Chief Executive Officer Eric Yuan, in a post on the company website, apologized for falling short and outlined the specific actions the company is taking.

• The numbers: Over 90,000 schools across 20 countries have have turned to Zoom for remote education. In December of last year, maximum number of daily meeting participants, both free and paid, conducted on Zoom was approximately 10 million. In March this year, it reached more than 200 million daily meeting participants, both free and paid. (Source: Zoom)
• The unforeseen issues: Zoom says its platform was built primarily for enterprise customers. “[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. We now have a much broader set of users who are utilizing our product in a myriad of unexpected ways, presenting us with challenges we did not anticipate when the platform was conceived.”
• Former Facebook and Yahoo Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos joins Zoom as an outside security consultant: In a blog post published today on Medium, former Facebook CSO Alex Stamos, said he has excepted Zooms offer to help the company build up its security, privacy and safety capabilities. “To be clear, I am not an employee or executive of Zoom, and I don’t speak for the company,” says Stamos. Also noting: “[Eric Yuan, Zoom’s founder and CEO] asked detailed and thoughtful questions of my experiences working at companies facing extreme crises, and I was impressed by his clear vision for Zoom as a trusted platform and his willingness to take aggressive action to get there.”