More than 300-million people used Zoom’s video conferencing software on 21 April, a 50% jump from the 200-million daily users at the beginning of the month, says Zoom CEO Eric Yuan during a webinar on Wednesday.
“Clearly, the Zoom platform is providing an incredibly valuable service to our beloved users during this challenging time,” Yuan said. “We are thrilled and honoured to continue to earn the trust of so many enterprises, hospitals, teachers and customers throughout the world,” he says.
As worldwide lockdowns have encouraged more people to begin using video conferencing technology to keep up with work, as well as with friends and family, Zoom has emerged the dominant platform. Its app is topping charts in both the app store and on the Google Play Store.
Zoom’s Privacy Problem
The company has been dealing with various security scandals to match its skyrocketing popularity. Amongst the platform’s many privacy issues is a practice called “Zoombombing” – this occurs when trolls hijack user meetings to harass them. The issues became so critical that CEO Yuan apologized for them publicly, promising to do better in the future.
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The company was also for a time sending analytics data to Facebook without alerting users, and while it has since reversed course, it was recently hit with a class-action lawsuit related to the data sharing.
In a blog post earlier Wednesday, Zoom announced that the new version of its software, set to roll out to users within the week, would have a number of features aimed at fixing some of those issues.
According to Business Insider, users will soon be able to report trolls who intrude on meetings uninvited, and they’ll also be able to take advantage of stronger AES 256-bit GCM encryption. Other changes to default settings around meeting passwords and “waiting rooms” — which help keep uninvited guests out of meetings — are already available to users, the post said.
UPDATE: As of 30 April 2020, Zoom has corrected the claim that it has 300 million users. Instead, The Verge reports that the company is now saying that it managed 300 million meeting participants in 1 month.
The difference between users (Daily Active Users – DAU) and “meeting participants” is that if you have five Zoom meetings in a day then you, a user, are counted five times. A DAU is counted once per day and is commonly used by companies to measure service usage.
To reflect this, the headline of this article has been changed from “Zoom Reaches 300 Million Active Users in 1 Month” to “Zoom Reaches 300-Million Meeting Participants in 1 Month.”
Edited by Luis Monzon
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