Zoom Video Communications has expanded its horizons with a new data center in Singapore, which is its first in Southeast Asia. The Singapore data center brings Zoom's total to 18 sites across the globe. In July, Zoom expanded its presence in India by opening a data center in Bangalore.
San Jose, Calif.—based Zoom plans to hire employees in Singapore, including engineers and sales staff, according to a story by Reuters. Zoom has seen a 65-fold increase in users of its free service in Singapore while also tripling the number of its paid customers since January.
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Zoom's platform has seen extensive use across the educational sector in Singapore with more than 45,000 educators and staff across 400 schools coming on board since March. Zoom is also used by the National University of Singapore
Zoom became the poster child for video conferencing during the coronavirus pandemic. With millions of employees working from home, along with students that were also home bound, Zoom saw massive growth. In April, Zoom said it had more than 300 million daily meeting participants after having 10 million in December.
Zoom initially struggled with not having encryption and other security measures in place during the coronavirus pandemic, which led to "Zoombombing" by disruptive, uninvited guests on video conferences. Zoom recently completed a 90-day security plan with the release of over 100 features.
Also in April, Singapore temporarily suspended the use of Zoom by teachers during the first week of a coronavirus lockdown due to security breaches that included obscene images during class lessons.
Zoom also came under fire for re-routing some of its calls through its servers in China, according to Reuters, even though the calls originated outside of China. Zoom said it resolved the problem by taking the mainland China data centers off of its list of back-ups for customers outside of China.