Facebook announces 50-person video chats after Zoom's success reportedly 'set off a scramble'

After Zoom's success during the coronavirus pandemic reportedly "set off a scramble" inside Facebook, the company has just announced a competitor.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Friday announced Messenger Rooms, a new free video chat feature that will support up to 50 people at once. Conferences on Messenger Rooms will have no time limit, and people who don't have Facebook accounts will be able to participate in them.

Zuckerberg said that users will be able to select who is allowed to discover and join their room or make it only accessible to those with a link. Once the feature rolls out, the top of a person's news feed will show the Messenger Rooms that are active and can be joined, "and you can just drop in," he explained.

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Zoom has reported its number of users has skyrocketed while the use of video conference services becomes widespread among people working from home during the pandemic. Zoom says it now has more than 300 million daily users after only having 10 million in December.

The New York Times reports that the massive success of Zoom this year "immediately set off a scramble" inside Facebook and prompted Zuckerberg to order "employees to ramp up and focus on the company's own video chat project." In fact, employees on Facebook's internal message boards "openly gawked" at Zoom's numbers, and privately, they've been "sore that they have not grabbed more of the same buzz as Zoom," the Times reports.

Zuckerberg told the Times in an interview on Friday that "the world was already trending in this direction before COVID-19," adding, "this is the trend in general — the ability to feel more present, even when you're not physically together."

Facebook said Messenger Rooms is rolling out in some countries this week and will expand to more "in the coming weeks." Brendan Morrow