Skype will ring for the last time on 5 May as owner Microsoft retires the two-decade-old internet calling service that redefined how people connect across borders.
Shutting down Skype will help Microsoft focus on its homegrown Teams service by simplifying its communication offerings, the office software giant said on Friday.
Founded in 2003, Skype quickly disrupted the landline industry in the early 2000s with its audio and video calls, making the company a household name boasting hundreds of millions of users at its peak. But the platform has struggled to keep up with easier-to-use and more reliable rivals such as Zoom and Salesforce’s Slack in recent years, in part because Skype’s underlying technology grew less suited for the smartphone era.
When the pandemic and work from home fueled the need for online business calls, Microsoft batted for Teams by aggressively integrating it with other Office apps to tap corporate users, once a major base for Skype.
Online video communication was once the near exclusive purview of Skype before the likes of FaceTime, Zoom and Google Hangouts took over. Skype was an early example of a tech product that was so ubiquitous it was used as a verb. Users would “Skype” someone in much the same way they would Google something.
When Microsoft bought Skype in 2011 for $8.5bn after outbidding Google and Facebook, its largest deal at the time, the service had about 150 million monthly users; by 2020, that number had fallen to roughly 23 million, despite a brief resurgence during the pandemic.
Over the years, Microsoft struggled to integrate Skype into its suite of tools and could not meet the moment when the company began seeing competition from Apple’s FaceTime and Google’s various communications app attempts. And when Microsoft launched its collaboration product Teams in 2017 that quickly took priority.
“We are honored to have been part of the journey,” Microsoft said on Friday. “Skype has been an integral part of shaping modern communications.”
To ease the transition from the platform, its users will be able to log into Teams for free on any supported device using their existing credentials, with chats and contacts migrating automatically.
skip past newsletter promotion
Sign up to TechScape
A weekly dive in to how technology is shaping our lives
Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
after newsletter promotion
For some, it may come as a surprise that Skype was still in operation given the company’s own years-long deprioritization of the platform. Launching successful communication tools has been a challenge for many of the big tech firms including Google. Now Skype will be laid to rest in the graveyard of communication tools alongside Duo and AOL Instant Messenger.
Microsoft declined to share the latest user figures for Skype and said there would be no job cuts due to the move. It added that Teams had about 320 million monthly active users.
