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Zoom: Did We Say 300 Million Daily Users? JK!

The company was totaling up 'participants' in each Zoom meeting, meaning repeat users were counted multiple times in a single day. 'This was a genuine oversight on our part,' Zoom says.

Michael Kan
 & Michael Kan Principal Reporter

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Zoom doesn’t actually have over 300 million daily users, as the company stated last week. That count includes repeat users, who may be using the service multiple times in a single day. 

On Wednesday, the video conferencing provider quietly made the clarification, which was noticed by The Verge. The April 22 blog post from Zoom that originally mentioned the company surpassing “300M daily users,” has now been changed to say “300M daily meeting participants.”

The revision seems subtle, but it actually means Zoom isn’t counting for unique users. Instead, the company is merely totaling up the “participants” in each Zoom meeting. So if you have three Zoom meetings in a single day, the company can count you three times, even though you’re one individual user. 

“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,” the company told PCMag. 

Zoom also used the same metric back on April 1, when the company mentioned it had “200 million daily meeting participants.” However, the actual unique user count remains unclear. The company declined to reveal the exact figure. 

Nevertheless, the daily meeting participant metric still shows that Zoom has skyrocketed in popularity since the COVID-19 pandemic began. In December, the daily meeting participant count for the product was at a mere 10 million. 

Related

However, other video conferencing products are catching up in popularity. Microsoft Teams was also able to attract 200 million daily meeting participants in a single day this month, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in an earnings call on Wednesday. “Teams now has more than 75 million daily active users,” he added. 

Google Meet, on the other hand, has been able to draw 100 million daily meeting participants, with peak daily usage up 30 times since January. The product is also now free for everyone.

Further Reading

Video Conferencing Software Reviews

About Our Expert

Michael Kan

Michael Kan

Principal Reporter

My Experience

I've been a journalist for over 15 years. I got my start as a schools and cities reporter in Kansas City and joined PCMag in 2017, where I cover satellite internet services, cybersecurity, PC hardware, and more. I'm currently based in San Francisco, but previously spent over five years in China, covering the country's technology sector.

Since 2020, I've covered the launch and explosive growth of SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet service, writing 600+ stories on availability and feature launches, but also the regulatory battles over the expansion of satellite constellations, fights with rival providers like AST SpaceMobile and Amazon, and the effort to expand into satellite-based mobile service. I've combed through FCC filings for the latest news and driven to remote corners of California to test Starlink's cellular service.

I also cover cyber threats, from ransomware gangs to the emergence of AI-based malware. In 2024 and 2025, the FTC forced Avast to pay consumers $16.5 million for secretly harvesting and selling their personal information to third-party clients, as revealed in my joint investigation with Motherboard.

I also cover the PC graphics card market. Pandemic-era shortages led me to camp out in front of a Best Buy to get an RTX 3000. I'm now following how the AI-driven memory shortage is impacting the entire consumer electronics market. I'm always eager to learn more, so please jump in the comments with feedback and send me tips.

The Best Tech I've Had:

  • My first video game console: a Nintendo Famicom
  • I loved my Sega Saturn despite PlayStation's popularity.
  • The iPod Video I received as a gift in college
  • Xbox 360 FTW
  • The Galaxy Nexus was the first smartphone I was proud to own.
  • The PC desktop I built in 2013, which still works to this day.

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