Researchers Discover That Some Zoom Calls Were Routed To China

Zoom just can’t seem to catch a break. Recently according to a report from the security researchers at Citizen Lab, they discovered that some Zoom calls were being routed through China. These were calls that were made in North America, but yet for some reason were being sent through China.

You would assume that calls made in North America would stay in North America, which is why this is rather alarming. Zoom’s CEO Eric Yuan has since come forward with a statement in which he claims that this was an accident, and he also offered up an explanation as to why that might have happened.

According to Yuan, “During normal operations, Zoom clients attempt to connect to a series of primary datacenters in or near a user’s region, and if those multiple connection attempts fail due to network congestion or other issues, clients will reach out to two secondary datacenters off of a list of several secondary datacenters as a potential backup bridge to the Zoom platform. In all instances, Zoom clients are provided with a list of datacenters appropriate to their region. This system is critical to Zoom’s trademark reliability, particularly during times of massive internet stress.”

Like we said, this has not been a particularly good week for Zoom. The company started gaining in popularity ever since more people are being forced to work and study from home, but its popularity also put it under a lot of scrutiny where security researchers started discovering various privacy and security flaws. Zoom has since pledged to spend the next 90 days fixing these issues.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: China, Privacy, zoom