As millions of employees around the world have suddenly been forced to work from home, video conferencing services have experienced an unprecedented surge in sign-ups. I took a quick look at our email traffic data to find out whether there is any evidence of this surge – and sure enough, there is.
When you sign up for an account with the popular Zoom platform, it sends you an activation email with the subject, “Please activate your Zoom account”. For people who perhaps had an old Zoom account, there seem to be many password resets from Zoom with the subject, “Your Zoom password has been reset.” And when it’s time to join a Zoom meeting in progress, Zoom sends out an email with the subject, “Please join Zoom meeting in progress”.
Searching through millions of email deliveries since the start of the year, the trend is obvious: Zoom is a whole lot more popular now than it was then. The email data suggests an increase in account activations of more than 20 times what Zoom was seeing in January. Older Zoom accounts are being reactivated like crazy. And we estimate that Zoom is experiencing a 10-fold increase in meetings. Try to imagine the workload that their ops team is experiencing right now just to keep the service alive. It’s mind-boggling.
