Slack hits user milestone amid remote work boom

In a flurry of tweets on Wednesday, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield revealed that the company has reached new user records for simultaneously connected users, largely due to the novel coronavirus pandemic driving more remote work. Butterfield said simultaneously connected users increased from 10.5 million on March 16 to 12.5 million on March 25.

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Additionally, from February 1 to March 25, Slack added 9,000 new paid customers, and over the same period average use of Slack increased roughly 20%. Last week Slack said via an SEC filing that it had added 7,000 net new customers in its current quarter, ahead of the preceding quarters in which it had added around 5,000. 

Slack defines simultaneously connected users as the number of people who are active on Slack at one time. Daily active users (DAUs) in Slack are measured by the number of users who have either created or consumed content in Slack within a given 24-hour period. 

Slack has been billed as a future of work beneficiary amid the global health crisis. Still, the company lags behind its biggest rival, Microsoft Teams, when it comes to DAUs. In October Slack said that it had 12 million DAUs on its platform, while also citing "deep engagement" among those users as evidence of its significant market penetration and edge over Microsoft Teams. 

Slack has not updated its DAU metric since October and continues to steer the conversation toward user engagement and this "simultaneously connected users" metric. 

Meanwhile, Microsoft said last week that DAUs have grown to 44 million since the COVID-19 pandemic spurred a shift to remote work. Microsoft defines daily active usage as the maximum daily users performing an "intentional act," like sending or replying to a chat or joining a meeting. 

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