Zoom became the pandemic’s social network. Its founder is well aware of the pressures that brings

Like the rest of us, Eric Yuan is taking things day by day right now. The Chinese-born American founder and chief executive of teleconferencing software company Zoom gets up each morning, after three or four hours’ sleep, and nervously checks the previous day’s capacity numbers to make sure the servers have not been over­whelmed by traffic. Then he begins the long slog of videoconference calls from his home in the San Francisco Bay Area. “It’s too many Zoom meetings,” he says, via Zoom. “I hate that.”

It’s not helping that, with schools and colleges cancelled, Yuan’s three children are at home clogging up the Wi-fi. The other night he got an email from a mother about a troll who invaded her child’s Zoom virtual classroom and showed inappropriate content. Afterwards, he couldn’t sleep.

The only thing keeping Yuan sane is his mother, who has been living with the family. Each day for lunch she brings him a noodle or rice dish she’s made, scolding him when he forgets to eat it. And if Yuan has time after dinner, mother and son take a walk in his garden. “I tell myself, every morning when I wake up, two things,” Yuan says. “Don’t let the world down. Don’t let our users down.”

A month ago his company was merely a fast-growing success story in the somewhat boring universe of enterprise communications. Today, suddenly, Zoom is critical infra­structure. As billions of people around the world socially distance to blunt the toll of the coronavirus, those lucky enough to still have jobs are trying to work them from home. To do so, they are turning to remote collaboration tools; messaging platforms such as Slack and videoconferenc­ing software like Cisco Webex, Microsoft Teams and, especially, Zoom, have seen explosions in traffic.