Zoom's previously publicized security and privacy issues have apparently not hampered the company's ability to gain new users. Despite the scandal that had faced the video conferencing startup, more and more users are still choosing to use Zoom's platform for their personal and business online meetings.
The California-based tech firm revealed this week that it had managed to surpass 300 million daily users on its platform. The number of daily users is 50 percent higher than the 200 million users the company had reported earlier in the month. It is also a huge jump from the 10 million daily active users it had reported in December, prior to the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.
Zoom clarified that it counts its daily users based on daily meeting participants. This means that if a person held five meetings through its platform in one day, it would be counted as five users. Still, the company claims that it has more than 300 million daily users on its website, stating the same number as the number of people using its app every day.
The figures might not be that hard to believe given the amount of work the company had done to resolve its platform's prior issues. Zoom recently placed a 90-day feature freeze for all users, stating that it will be releasing a new version that will be free of issues. The company announced that it will be releasing the new version, called Zoom 5.0, within this week. The new version will have ramped up encryption, password authentication, and a host of other security features.
The company hopes that the new version will address all of the problems that had plagued its platform. Zoom had received major backlash from users and regulators in the previous weeks after reports started to circulate of apparent security and privacy flaws within the platform. The company was accused of having insufficient security practices, which had led to the launch of several investigations.
The scandal resulted in the company's stocks sharply plummeting, erasing the previous gains it had made when it received a surge of new users amid the shelter-in-place orders and lockdowns imposed by governments to mitigate the spread of the virus.
Zoom did not deny the accusations and instead made a public apology for its lapses. The company admitted that it had some lapses in its security and encryption technology, while also confirming that it had routed some calls through China during times where its servers could no longer handle the surge in traffic. Zoom vowed to fix the issues and enhance its platform to better serve its customers.
