Microsoft Teams tops 75M daily active users, as Zoom adjusts its own user numbers

Microsoft is reporting another big jump in usage of its Teams communication and collaboration platform, reporting that it has surpassed 75 million daily active users. That’s up more than 70% from the 44 million daily active users reported by Microsoft on March 19.

The new number was announced by Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, during the company’s earnings conference call Thursday afternoon. The growth illustrates how remote work is changing the way people use technology, and it also explains one of the reasons why Microsoft’s revenue and profits climbed in the March quarter. The company’s Productivity and Business Processes division, which includes Teams, grew 15% to $11.7 billion in revenue.

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“Some COVID-19-era habits will prove temporal — I know many parents who can’t wait for the return of in-person play dates, for instance. But we believe the habits we see in Teams are more durable and will persist well beyond the current crisis,” writes Jared Spataro, Microsoft 365 corporate vice president, in a blog post detailing the latest Microsoft Teams user numbers.

Teams is included with Microsoft 365 subscriptions for businesses, and companies need to upgrade to higher versions of those plans to unlock more advanced features of the program, such as video calls. Microsoft is also coming out with versions of Teams for personal and family use.

Meanwhile, Zoom this week corrected a user number it had released, saying it has 300 million daily Zoom meeting participants, not 300 million daily active users. The Verge, which spotted the change, explains that a single user can count as a meeting participant multiple times, once for each meeting.

Zoom is still ahead of Microsoft by that metric. The Redmond company says it logged 200 million meeting participants in one day this month.

Oracle this week announced that Zoom has chosen its cloud infrastructure to help support a spike in usage. Responding to an inquiry from GeekWire, a Zoom spokesperson said the company continues to use Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and Amazon Web Services, as well.

Microsoft Teams also competes with Slack, Cisco and Google Meet, which have seen their own increases in usage due to remote work.