Zoom says it has 300 million daily meeting participants, not users

(Reuters) - Video conferencing provider Zoom <ZM.O> said on Thursday it had mistakenly published a blog last week that put its daily users at 300 million people when the figure instead referred to the number of meeting participants.

The Zoom blog from April 22 has now been edited to say that the company had surpassed "300 million daily Zoom meeting participants" instead of "more than 300 million daily users". (https://bit.ly/2x47sEY)

Shares of the video conferencing app fell nearly 7% to $136.86 in afternoon trade following an initial report by The Verge, which spotted the change in the blog post to meeting participants.

Reuters and other media outlets have been reporting Zoom's meeting participants figure as daily active users. The company had not issued any clarification on how it was calculating its daily active users before the Verge report.

A daily active user is defined as using the video conferencing service at least once a day and a meeting participant is counted as the member of a meeting. Thus a single daily active user could be counted multiple times as a meeting participant in a single day.

Shares of Zoom rose 12% to a record high of $168.24 in April when it first reported that its daily active users had topped 300 million.

Microsoft said on Wednesday that its Teams had 75 million daily active users and had at least one day in April when there were 200 million meeting participants. Cisco Systems Inc's <CSCO.O> video-conferencing app Webex also said it registered a record 324 million attendees in March.

As corporations and schools shift to remote work and billions of people subject to stay-at-home orders seek ways to remain connected, Zoom has seen a surge in demand for its services. But it has also experienced a backlash as the increased use exposed privacy and security flaws.

(Reporting by Subrat Patnaik, Neha Malara and Supantha Mukherjee in Bengaluru; Editing by Amy Caren Daniel and Maju Samuel)