Zoom is being banned over security concerns by some US school districts, including NYC, which is directing teachers to switch to Microsoft Teams
Zoom's popularity has taken off … Tweets: Brad Lander / @bradlander : This is a terrible decision @NYCSchools @DOEChancellor. Our teachers, students, and families have put in massive amounts of work to stand up their classes. It would wreck the best parts of remote learning. To be honest, I hope teachers just ignore it. https://chalkbeat.org/... Charlie Miller / @0xcharlie : This is a decision made by reading scary headlines and not understanding threat models or risk or software security basics. If enough people switch to MS teams, we'll see similar issues reported with that software. https://chalkbeat.org/... Katie Honan / @katie_honan : The DOE is banning Zoom & video conference portion of Google Classrooms over “general” security concerns. I've heard from teachers who say they feel deflated after learning & teaching students/families these programs only to have city take it away https://www.wsj.com/... @blackamazon : These are all community concerns and civic tech concerns that are thrust on platforms which actually never catered to most people and they are critical now. People need them. https://twitter.com/... Kate Shaw / @kateashaw1 : Agree with everything @bradlander says here - a terrible call by @NYCSchools to forbid schools from using @zoom_us just as teachers & families were getting comfortable with the new normal. There are better ways to deal with very real privacy & security concerns https://twitter.com/... Yuan Yang / @yuanfenyang : *long, silent screaming* “A company primarily catering to North American clients that sometimes distributes encryption keys through servers in China is potentially concerning” - @citizenlab. Story by @mshannahmurphy @ft 1/ https://www.ft.com/... @wsj : Zoom chief Eric Yuan said the company is cooperating with authorities as it has fielded questions from 27 U.S. attorney general's offices about the platform's security https://www.wsj.com/... Paul Ford / @ftrain : This is true. It sucks. Communication about it is confusing. MSFT Teams requires more resources. Kids don't have wifi or machines (or safe places to sleep). But you just can't have 1.1 million kids vulnerable to being shown porn or screamed at by racist channer griefers. https://twitter.com/... Grace Rauh / @gracerauh : This is such bad news to me as a parent! We have spent the last 2 weeks getting our kids adjusted to learning over Zoom & watching our teachers figure out how to use it best and now it will be taken away?? Enough! Our teachers are doing a tremendous job. Don't make it harder. https://twitter.com/... @jason : No one who cares about security or privacy should trust software made in China, controlled by a Chinese company or hosted on a Chinese server—it really is that simple. If you're @Scobleizer & don't care about privacy, sure... go for it! https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Chancellor Richard A. Carranza / @doechancellor : Brad - I'm a huge fan of yours. But this is not correct. The transition will happen. But not immediately. We will NOT put our student data in danger. I know you don't want to endanger student data either. https://twitter.com/... Brad Lander / @bradlander : After conversations w/teachers, families, cybersecurity folks and @NYCSchools ... I'm even more sure this is a terrible decision. @zoom_us is far from perfect. Changes must be made. But forbidding its use will severely damage remote learning. Right now, that is worse. THREAD https://twitter.com/... Sean Byrnes / @sbyrnes : This is an enormous missed opportunity for Zoom. While it was never possible for them to foresee what would happen, it's evidence that being privacy centric is always a long-term good strategy. https://www.fastcompany.com/ ... Justin Alexander / @hexcrawl : The people attempting to educate your children are banning technology because they don't know how to use a password and are publicly posting access links to their meetings on their websites. “How are these hackers doing it?!” https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... @profcarroll : Ridiculous overreaction. Yeah, that's coming from me. I've got kids in DOE home schooling. Zoom and Google Classroom are flawed lifelines. Deal with it! https://twitter.com/... Tressie McMillan Cottom / @tressiemcphd : This is actually a good thing. Zoom's scammy software issues are a problem for any user but imagine the size and diversity of the NYC school system. Requiring malware at that scale, for these populations is bad (in the simplest terms). https://twitter.com/... Michael Cohen / @speechboy71 : NYC's DOE is completely clueless. I hope teachers ignore this https://twitter.com/... @artsjournalnews : Zoom Seemed Too Good To Be True: And, turns out, it was. This is why New York just banned it as a tool for teachers: “Zoom contains a number of critical privacy and security flaws, as educators have been learning the hard way. Anyone with a Zoom meetin... https://www.fastcompany.com/ ... Lisa Abramowicz / @lisaabramowicz1 : “Zoombombing” leads to a deeply apologetic CEO. “Sometimes you have a good intention, and sometimes you get punished...we need to slow down and think about privacy and security first.” https://www.wsj.com/... Thomas LaRock / @sqlrockstar : Scathing report about Zoom and how they are awful at security and privacy. If you are using them, stop and consider something else. https://www.schneier.com/... Matthew Green / @matthew_d_green : This is a dumb overreaction. https://chalkbeat.org/... Anand Giridharadas / @anandwrites : Read the virtual room. https://chalkbeat.org/... Quarantined William LeGate / @williamlegate : Zoom is malware. End of story. https://twitter.com/... Kenn White / @kennwhite : Turns out uninformed scare-mongering hype has consequences. An infosec community (and stenographer media) with zero sense of risk-benefit drove this. https://twitter.com/... @kimcrayton1 : These are the kinds of statements that come from folx whose perspectives are limited to their own privilege Moving students quickly is one thing, I'm still not sure why they weren't moved to dedicated e-learning platforms, but keeping them there, after known risks, is another https://twitter.com/... SteelyM / @steelym23 : @emilynussbaum They're not trying to stop meetings. There have been hacking incidents, so they want to switch to (more secure?) Microsoft Teams. (I am skeptical that it's worth the effort to change. It sounds like there might be workarounds that make Zoom safe.) https://chalkbeat.org/... Chris Hayes / @chrislhayes : I get that there are issues w Zoom, but at this point, from a cost/benefit perspective, but this is just an insane thing to do. Come on. https://twitter.com/... Ben Smith / @benyt : Of all the things... https://twitter.com/... @dhh : One step forward, two steps back. Zoom reverts to its old ways of blaming users for failing to understand its shitty policies and protections, in response to schools banning the service. ZOOMBOMBING IS NOT ELEMENTARY TEACHERS' FAULT. Sheesh. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... https://twitter.com/... Emily Nussbaum / @emilynussbaum : WHY is the DOE banning Zoom and Google Hangouts? All of these decisions seems so crazy and precipitous—they cancel Spring Break, including Passover/GF, then remove any possibility of distance-learning being something other than endless alienated homework. Paul Ford / @ftrain : This is an actual IT services trainwreck (even more than the guy in LA who tried to smash a train into the hospital ship). It's leaving so, so many kids behind. https://twitter.com/... Doug Gordon / @brooklynspoke : Not sure why teachers who aren't already doing this can't just use the waiting room feature and approve participants. They know who is/isn't in their classrooms. Can also turn off screen sharing and disable chat features. Far easier than transitioning to a new platform. https://twitter.com/... Leonie Haimson / @leoniehaimson : What If Zoom violates state student privacy law @bradlander You still think schools should be using it? https://twitter.com/... Michelle Goldberg / @michelleinbklyn : Getting up to speed on all the remote learning platforms our school requires has been hellishly frustrating. I can't believe they're doing this right as some of us were finally starting to find a rhythm. Please, please reverse this decision. https://twitter.com/... Tony Romm / @tonyromm : sure, scaling so quickly is difficult, but there's also an entire genre of books about tech companies that overlooked basic infrastructure issues until they were too big. it feels this industry lacks any sense of its own history sometimes. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Karen Vaites / @karenvaites : People have talked about Zoombombing like it's a security flaw. I'm not sure that's as accurate as saying that it's cyberterrorism. Especially noting the FBI involvement. Great article on the new issues: 1/2 https://www.nytimes.com/... Joseph Jerome / @joejerome : “It's taking all the work we've done and flushing it down the toilet — and you're going to lose some kids along the way.” Zoom is the #edtech that really pits privacy against the digital divide. https://twitter.com/... Gissey B / @chieflegit : Lmfaoooo. It really doesn't take a long time to vet the security concerns around zoom because i did it in less than 5 minutes. NYC DOE is a joke at this point. https://twitter.com/... Carrie Melago / @carriemelago : Big change for teachers and parents still adjusting to this new reality 👇🏼 https://twitter.com/... Sam Quigley / @emerose : This is just fantastically dumb, prompted by hysteria and hyperbole far out of touch with reality. https://chalkbeat.org/... Lindsey Barrett / @lam_barrett : well now we're cooking with gas https://twitter.com/... Tama Leaver / @tamaleaver : Hardly a shock. I believe state government K-12 schools in Western Australia haven't approved Zoom use, either. Zoom banned from New York City schools due to privacy and security flaws https://www.fastcompany.com/ ... Stuart Bruce PR Futurist / @stuartbruce : Sensible. Many schools already use Microsoft 365 and Teams is already secured so only teachers and students have access. Much better than complicating situation with unnecessary third party solution. Hopefully @Rodillian_Ac will start using it for classes after Easter? https://twitter.com/... Phil Hill / @philonedtech : That most-used of remote teaching crutches is becoming more problematic. Zoom CEO has acknowledged issues and froze all feature development while they try to fix security / privacy. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... I would give h/t to Jeanette Wiseman if I knew her Twitter handle. Richard Blumenthal / @senblumenthal : Mysterious corporate ties to China, weak encryption, servers in Beijing, & now more privacy vulnerabilities—a chilling warning: @Zoom_us is not private or secure. https://citizenlab.ca/... David Barnard / @drbarnard : I've been giving @zoom_us the benefit of the doubt, assuming that the privacy histeria was overblown. And that the extra scrutiny would make them 10X better than other video solutions not in the limelight. Now I'm starting to think that was wildly naive of me. Fool me once... https://twitter.com/... Saeed Jones / @theferocity : Experienced this recently first-hand, trolls flooded a zoom panel about queer memoir writing with images of graphic pornography. It was awful and saddening. I know friends who have been targeted with racist harassment. https://www.nytimes.com/... Kontra / @counternotions : Honest mistake, rogue engineer, who could have predicted, our users' security and privacy come first, here's a $100,000 check for Planned Parenthood, are you happy now?! ↓ https://twitter.com/... @dhh : An exhaustive account of all Zoom's privacy and security transgressions. When you see it all collected like this.. well, just, wow. https://tidbits.com/... Glenn Fleishman / @glennf : I compiled a list of every known Zoom security exploit, software bug, privacy failure, and bad decision (many now remediated) and what you can do about each of them. I had to add six in the last two days while writing & editing it. @TidBITS https://tidbits.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The ban is the escalation of a pressure campaign already underway: days earlier, New York's attorney general sent a letter to Zoom flagging weak encryption and server-routing concerns just as classrooms moved onto the service. NYC's Department of Education responded by banning Zoom and the video-conferencing piece of Google Classroom, directing teachers to Microsoft Teams instead.
The decision immediately split opinion along expertise lines — council member Brad Lander called it a wrecking ball for weeks of teacher setup work, while security researcher Charlie Miller argued it was headline-driven risk assessment that would simply surface equivalent flaws in whatever replaced Zoom. The stakes are large because NYC is the biggest district to move, and Microsoft has an obvious interest in the switch.
First-order effects
- NYC teachers who spent weeks standing up Zoom classes are being told to rebuild them on Teams mid-semester, with the DOE — not educators — making the tooling call.
- Zoom responds by freezing feature development entirely to work through security and privacy fixes, while fielding questions from 27 U.S. attorneys general offices.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft gets a massive K-12 beachhead handed to it by a regulator's action rather than a competitive bid — rivals later alleged it deployed 50 staffers to cement the district relationship.
- Security scrutiny follows the users: if enough districts migrate to Teams, researchers expect comparable vulnerabilities to be reported there, meaning bans based on headlines may not reduce actual risk.
Third-order effects
- School-district procurement is shifting toward whichever vendor can absorb political and legal pressure — a bespoke build and dedicated staff beat a better product with bad press, as shown when the DOE reversed the ban once Zoom agreed to a customized city platform.
- State attorneys general are emerging as de facto gatekeepers for consumer software used in sensitive contexts, forcing platforms to treat government relationships as core infrastructure rather than compliance overhead.
The trend: Video conferencing is becoming a trust-and-procurement battleground where attorney general scrutiny and vendor staffing capacity, not product quality alone, decide which platform wins institutional deployments.