Malissa, a recent high school graduate from Los Angeles, has found viral fame after crashing multiple classes on Zoom and uploading the results to TikTok.

The project, which Malissa started as a way to cope with quarantine boredom and even learn from online classes, evolved into mass coordinated crashes with her followers who provide her with their courses' Zoom codes.

"Zoombombing," as the trend has come to be called, is becoming popular beyond the high school setting, and college professors are reporting disruptions to their classes.

Malissa's Zoom TikTok account was banned on Wednesday evening, but she has short-term plans to continue crashing.

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For the past four days, Malissa has started her mornings at 6:00 AM. She wakes up, immediately checks her DMs on Instagram, and finalizes her class schedule for the day. School begins at 8:00 AM and continues well into the afternoon.

But the 17-year-old actually graduated from high school in February. Through California's independent study program, she managed her own classwork and completed the necessary credits for graduation several months early. Over the course of the last week, however, she's been crashing classes on Zoom — and uploading her results to TikTok until her account was permanently banned on Wednesday evening.

Confined to her home due to social distancing precautions, Malissa says she doesn't "have anything better to do," so she's been crowd-sourcing Zoom codes for various classes and "popping in and out."

A screenshot from Malissa's since-deleted TikTok account, which racked up hundreds of thousands of views Screenshot/@m41issa/TikTok

Her first attempt at "Zoombombing," which she uploaded to TikTok last week, racked up over 732,000 views and 175,000 likes before it was removed from the platform along with her account.

"I joined someone else's zoom class," she captioned the video. "Message me zoom codes & schedules!!"

"Who's Malissa?" a teacher can be seen asking in the background of the call.

"I just wanna learn. About Macbeth and everything," Malissa responds in the clip as other students on the call start to laugh. "I just wanna learn, I won't interrupt or anything."

Several days later, the high school graduate went on to post another TikTok advertising her plan to her followers.

"Guys I wanna make it a trend where everyone just goes into random Zoom classes! Please!" she says in the since-removed clip.

"Only Gen Z, though," she clarifies. "Gen Z takeover."

Her call for participants reached a wide audience, and she receives a constant flow of DMs containing Zoom codes and class descriptions — more DMs than she says she can keep track of.

Malissa says she's just bored and wants to learn.

"[In some classes]I sit back and observe and don't interrupt or act disrespectful," she told Insider. If they want me to leave, then I leave."

In several classes, she's announced herself and been removed from the calls. In others, she's been permitted to stay and follow along.

"I just [took] an art class and I'm going back next week to complete a new art style that I just learned about," she said.

The real "chaos," she says, comes from when she "raids" a class.

Sometimes, the Zoom crashes are done with the intention of derailing an entire class. If a student sends Malissa a Zoom code with a tip about disliking a class or teacher (accusations range in severity from teachers being 'rude' to racist) she disrupts the call and encourages her followers to do the same.

"What I encourage people to do is rap Nicki Minaj, play music from the movie 'Ratatouille,' or play music by CupcakKe," she said. "I do not encourage people to tell the teacher mean things."

Group crashes have included as many as 60 people (the average, she estimates is around 30 people for widely advertised Zoom calls). Malissa has even made friends with a few of her "regulars."

Occasionally, she feels guilty about the trolling mission. Specifically, she's remorseful about accidentally crashing a class that students have paid for.

Earlier this week, Malissa unintentionally entered a college sociology class with a few followers. Things "went south," she says, after several crashers joined. She left the call in a panic when someone mentioned her name and her TikTok account.

"I felt absolutely terrible for the professor and his students," she recalled. "That's time they paid for just to be burned away by teenage boredom."

After that, she made it clear she would not be accepting Zoom codes for college classes.

The mission to start a wave of Zoom crashes seems to have been successful — and it's causing massive disruptions for students and teachers alike.

Malissa and her followers aren't the only ones breaking into Zoom classes. A Twitter account called @zoom_codes encourages followers to send in codes for upcoming classes to be retweeted for other potential Zoombombers to join in — and some aspiring crashers are blatantly advertising their plans to find viral fame.

"Someone send me their zoom login / codes to classrooms or whatever I'm trying to make a video of me trolling," one Twitter user wrote is a post that has received thousands of likes.

While Malissa herself doesn't advocate for crashing college classes, Zoombombing has become an issue in college settings.

One Zoom crash took a turn for the worse during a virtual Introduction to Storytelling class at Arizona State University, Inside Higher Ed reported. Almost immediately after the class began, an anonymous participant displayed a pornographic video for the entire class to see. The comments section of the call quickly devolved into what the class' Professor, Lance Gharavi, called "vulgar, racist, misogynistic, toilet humor."

"I have never had a day as nightmarish as that in the classroom where I was completely unable to control what happened," Ghavari told the outlet. "And what happened was horrifying and potentially triggering to some of my students."

Zoom has responded to reports of crashers with a blog post listing measures to prevent incidents of Zoombombing. Tips include employing the platform's "Waiting Room" feature that allows hosts to control participants' entry into a call and managing the call's screen-sharing options.

"We are deeply upset to hear about the incidents involving this type of attack," a spokesperson for the platform told Insider in a statement. "For those hosting private meetings, password protections are on by default and we recommend that users keep those protections on to prevent uninvited users from joining. We also recently updated the default screen sharing settings for our education users so teachers by default are the only ones who can share content in class."

The statement continued: "We strongly condemn such behavior and we encourage users to report any incidents of this kind directly to https://support.zoom.us/hc/en- us/requests/new so we can take appropriate action."

While some Zoom crashes are still receiving online attention, Malissa's catalog of Zoombombing disappeared when her account was permanently banned from TikTok.

On Wednesday evening, she received a notice from the platform informing her that her account had been banned for violating "community guidelines."

A screenshot of Malissa's notification from TikTok that her account had been banned Screenshot/M41issa/TikTok

Malissa says she wasn't notified about what material led to the account ban — but she admits to posting profanity and an inappropriate image in addition to the Zoom crashes.

"I'm not even going to try [to contest the ban] because I understand why they would ban it," she said.

A spokesperson for TikTok told Insider that the flagged content violated the section of the community guidelines relating to "sexually explicit content."

Despite the TikTok ban, Malissa plans to continue crashing Zoom classes — at least for a little while.

Within hours of the ban, she created a new TikTok account — and she still has plans for her project.

"Now that I know what not to do, I know how far I can go," she explained. "I'm fueled by how many people message me their codes and schedules."

Still, the future is uncertain, much like the fickle nature of viral fame.

"But honestly I don't know [what's next]," Malissa said. " I think my five seconds of fame is soon to end anyway."

Update: This article has been updated to remove Malissa's last name after she received online harassment.

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