By John Villasenor | Brookings
It’s a cybersecurity vulnerability that would have been unimaginable as recently as last year: A single California-based company, Zoom, is now the foundation for education access from elementary school up through graduate school. It has also become a critical tool for many businesses. When Zoom goes down, teachers can’t teach, students can’t learn, and business meetings, conferences, and webinars grind to a halt.
That was demonstrated in dramatic form on Monday, August 24 when a widespread outage blocked many users from accessing Zoom. Just before 6 AM Pacific time, the company acknowledged the problem in a statement, writing “We are currently investigating and will provide updates as we have them.” An hour later, Zoom said that it had “identified the issue” and was “working on a fix.” Finally, over three hours after it had first acknowledged the problem, Zoom announced that “We have resolved the issue.”
