With 316 million people in all but 8 states being urged to stay home by the government and their communities, it's no surprise that the country needed to find a way to conduct business virtually. For a vast portion of the U.S., the solution was Zoom (ZM  ), a videoconferencing app that is now facing a variety of privacy and safety concerns. NASA, the German Foreign Office, the New York City school system, the Taiwanese government, and now Google have all banned the use of Zoom due to doubts about the app's ability to keep meetings secure.

"We have long had a policy of not allowing employees to use unapproved apps for work that are outside of our corporate network," Jose Castaneda, a spokesperson for Google (GOOGL  ), told PCMag. "Recently, our security team informed employees using Zoom Desktop Client that it will no longer run on corporate computers as it does not meet our security standards for apps used by our employees."

Zoom has experienced an unbelievable boom in membership since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. In December 2019, the company averaged 10 million users a day. By the end of March, that number had reached 200 million. According to The Hill, 90,000 schools and 20 countries are among Zoom's users. Zoom's CEO Eric Yuan, who has been seen as something of a tech darling, says his company was unprepared to support the "tremendous" influx of users and acknowledged and apologized for the fact that the company had "fallen short of the community's - and our own - privacy and security expectations."

"We did not design the product with the foresight that, in a matter of weeks, every person in the world would suddenly be working, studying, and socializing from home," Yuan wrote in a blog post to users posted April 1."We now have a much broader set of users who are utilizing our product in a myriad of unexpected ways, presenting us with challenges we did not anticipate when the platform was conceived."

Security concerns faced by the company are widespread. Schools in Singapore have had uninvited men join classes to make lewd comments at teenage girls. "Zoombombing", as it is commonly called, is when an uninvited guest crashes a meeting. Berkley High School in California also banned the use of the app after a "naked adult male using racial slurs" joined one of the school's password-protected meetings held on Zoom.

Zoom recently added a "Security" tab to their app which gives "easy access to several existing Zoom security features" to hosts and co-hosts. The company has also committed to third-party safety evaluations and has promised to make privacy protocols more transparent. The company has also announced it will be hiring Alex Stamos, former chief security officer at Facebook (FB  ), to advise them.