Lying about having 300 million users, Zoom continued to shoot himself in the leg

Many businesses are struggling in the context of a corona virus outbreak, but Zoom is the exception among them. Just last week, the online video conferencing service proudly announced it had more than 300 million daily users - a remarkable achievement over the end of last year. This achievement is so good that it makes some people doubt it - and it turns out that suspicion is right.

According to The Verge's new report, Zoom silently admitted that they lied about that number. On its blog, the company is removing posts related to its " 300 million users " statement. Instead, the post states that the company currently has " 300 million people attending meetings on Zoom every day. "

Clearly, there is a huge difference between the number of users per day and the number of people attending the meeting.

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Unlike the number of daily users, the number of people attending a daily meeting can be many times greater than the number of real users. That's because, the same user can participate in many different meetings in one day and each time, the company counts that there is a new user joining its service.

Therefore, the actual number of Zoom users per day may be many times lower than the company statement.

A mistake comes at a time that can't be worse

Talking about these misleading words, Zoom told The Verge that the company "was humble and proud of helping 300 million people attending the meeting every day to stay connected throughout the era." translate . "

" In the April 22 post, we inadvertently assumed that the participants in the meeting were" users "and" people " ." A spokesman for the company said. " When we realized this mistake, we adjusted the sentence to" meeting participants. "This was a mistake on our part ."

Zoom's linguistic negligence comes at a time that cannot be worse for the company's operations. After recent explosive growth, almost every week, the company is not faced with a different allegation related to its operations and services.

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In less than a month, the video voice service was allegedly secretly sending user data to Facebook, leaking emails and personal photos to strangers, as well as lying about its encryption capabilities. . The researchers also found that security holes in Zoom could expose the login credentials of Windows users. Not to mention the harassment of Zoom meetings, a phenomenon called Zoombombing.

Even Zoom's security incidents are so numerous that shareholders themselves have sued the company for hiding their privacy standards.

Meanwhile, other giants like Facebook or Google are trying to gnaw at Zoom's market share. Zuckerberg's empire has just launched its own video calling service, Messenger Rooms, which supports up to 50 participants. And Google just announced the free Google Meet service for everyone, and did not forget to mock the security capabilities of the opponent.

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But the biggest rival Zoom is facing is the company itself.

After shooting itself in the foot with too many flaws in security and privacy, the company is destroying its own achievements with misleading words. Meeting 300 million people every day is also a desirable success for many other services, and the company broke it by saying it was 300 million users a day.

However, maybe time is still for Zoom. While the company is trying to fix its flaws, and although many reputable organizations have voiced their ban on using Zoom, many are still flocking to the service. If the company itself does not make more new mistakes, it may still be time to convince users to stay at Zoom.