Marking a major correction, Zoom now says it is not serving
300 million daily active users.
Rather, the video-conferencing platform says it has an average of 300 million meeting “participants.”
As its name implies, a “daily
active user” can only be counted once per day. However, if one user participates in 10 conferences in a single day, that is recorded as 10 “participants.” (Zoom is not saying how
many DAUs is it now seeing.)
Zoom initially claimed that its DAUs had spiked from 10 million in December to 300 million, on April 22. As was first reported by The Verge, the company has
since restated those figures in terms of participants.
“This was a genuine oversight on our part,” Zoom stated. “We unintentionally referred to these participants as
‘users’ and ‘people.’”
Genuine or not, the error supports the picture of a company struggling with its rapid rise in prominence.
Since the pandemic made
Zoom a household name, a number of privacy issues have come to light.
At the beginning of the month, Zoom was hit with a privacy lawsuit over data transfers to Facebook, while Richard
Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) raised concerns about the company.
Also this month, it
was discovered that the credentials of
more than half a million Zoom accounts were being sold on the dark Web.
Amid surging demand for its services, Zoom is also contending with new entrants into the video-conferencing space.
Facebook recently launched
Messenger Rooms, which, unlike Zoom, is free to users regardless of how many people they host in their video chats.
Just this week,Google Cloud said it was
making its video-conferencing platform free to all users.
Also eying Zoom’s market share, Verizon Business recently
agreed to buy
cloud-based video service BlueJeans Network.