The COVID Diaries – 50 17th May
Technical problems with the video conferencing platform Zoom affected Downing Street’s daily coronavirus briefing today. Journalists are usually able to ask questions live on screen, but instead they had to submit written questions to be read out by the business secretary, Alok Sharma, who was hosting the briefing.
Users of Zoom reported many outages, with people unable to host or join meetings and thousands having issues with the service.
Sunday church services experienced problems across the UK and the US. Zoom’s popularity has rocketed since the start of the coronavirus epidemic, but concerns have been raised with the platform’s lax security, highlighted by “Zoombombing” incidents where trolls enter meetings uninvited.