Zoom scaled from 20 million to 300 million users virtually over night. What’s incredible is from the outside they’ve shown little in the way of apparent growing pains, though on the inside it’s a good bet a lot of craziness is going on.
Sure, Zoom has made some design decisions that made sense as a small spunky startup that don’t make a lot of sense as a defacto standard, but that’s to be expected. It’s not a sign of bad architecture as many have suggested. It’s just realistically how products evolve, especially when they must uplift over weeks, days, and even hours.
Sudden success invites scrutiny, so everyone wants to know how Zoom works. The problem is we don’t know much, but we do have a few information sources: