Zoom, the world’s most widely-used video conferencing platform, announced on Tuesday that it has officially opened a data center in Singapore, Bloomberg reported, marking its first expansion in Southeast Asia.
The data center, the first in the region, is the company’s 18th globally. Zoom has also scaled in India, where it currently has two data centers, in Mumbai and Hyderabad, and saw a 6,700% rise in free user sign-ups from January to April.
Though Zoom’s stocks have surged due to increasing use of video calls during COVID-19, its privacy and security measures have been put under scrutiny. In April, Zoom apologized for “mistakenly” routing meetings and encryption keys through China, even though no meeting participants were based there. Google has also banned Zoom from employees’ desktops due to security concerns.
In Singapore, students attended classes via Zoom during the ‘circuit breaker’ period, when movement restrictions were tightened. However, use of the platform was briefly suspended in April when hackers hijacked a video call and showed obscene pictures to students.