Sarah Tew/CNET
Zoom is backtracking on an announcement last week that it’s videoconferencing app had racked up 300 million daily users. Instead, the company now says it has “300 million daily meeting participants,” a different metric that counts people for every Zoom meeting they attend in a day.
The change was earlier spotted by The Verge. After the publication reached out to the company, Zoom on Wednesday added an edit note to its blog post, calling the error an oversight.
“We are humbled and proud to help over 300 million daily meeting participants stay connected during this pandemic, said a Zoom spokesperson in an emailed statement on Thursday. “In a blog post on April 22, we unintentionally referred to these participants as ‘users’ and ‘people.’ When we realized this error, we adjusted the wording to ‘participants.’ This was a genuine oversight on our part.”
Zoom didn’t respond to a request for details on its number of daily active users. That more widely used metric counts individual app users once per day, regardless of how many Zoom meeting they might attend in a day.
As the coronavirus pandemic has forced millions of people to stay home over the past two months, Zoom has became the video meeting service of choice for many. Daily meeting participants on the platform surged from 10 million in December to 200 million in March, and now 300 million in April. With that popularity, Zoom’s security issues have also attracted more attention — along with a handful of lawsuits.
The erroneous daily user numbers came from CEO Eric Yuan’s update on Zoom’s 90-day security plan. Last month, Yuan said the company would stop adding new features to Zoom so it can devote its resources to addressing issues like “Zoombombing,” when uninvited attendees enter your meeting.