Some calls were routed through China by mistake, admits Zoom

The video conferencing app, Zoom which has earlier promised end-to-end encryption, offered an apology while admitting that some calls were indeed routed through China.

Security researchers at Citizen Lab in Canada have reported on Friday that some Zoom calls made in North America were routed through China so were the encryption keys used to secure those calls.

Over the past few weeks, Zoom has experienced a massive influx of users on its app and in effort to ramp up the served capacity, it "mistakenly" allowed two of its Chinese data centres to accept calls as a backup in the event of network congestion, the company said in a statement.

The end-to-end encryption is a system of communication where only the communicating users can read the messages. Through end-to-end encryption, companies intend to prevent data from being read or secretly modified by any third party.

The app is owned by Chinese businessman, Eric Yuan, and is headquartered in San Jose, California, United States. 

The app which shot up to fame this year after coronavirus pandemic forced millions of people to work from home. The app lets users add up to 100 people in their virtual meetings.

This week, Zoom faced a barrage of headlines after concerns were raised over its privacy and security policies and the latest admission by Zoom app proves that the company controls the encryption keys and can, therefore, access the contents of its customers’ calls.