[Image: Flickr]
Microsoft has announced that it will be shutting down the messaging platform Skype after nearly two decades.
The video conferencing platform will no longer be available as of May 2025, and users will have to embrace a “more advanced communication and collaboration hub.”
Teams offers many of Skype’s main features, such as one-on-one and group calls, messaging, and file sharing, but with quite a few extra features.
Skype users will have the choice to switch to Teams or export their data, and you will be able to sign into Teams using their Skype passwords. Your existing chats and contacts will also automatically appear in the app, so you don’t have to miss any of those lovely check-ins with the boss.
Founded in 2003, Skype took over from the landline industry with its audio and video calls, making the company a household name with hundreds of millions of users at its peak. Despite a slight boom during the COVID era, the platform has struggled to keep up with easier-to-use rivals like Zoom and Slack, in part also because Skype’s underlying tech was less suited for the smartphone era.
Microsoft bought Skype in 2011 for $8.5 billion after outbidding Google and Facebook. At the time, it had about 150 million monthly users, but by 2020, that number had fallen to 23 million. Compared to Teams’ 320 million monthly active users, Skype was always on borrowed time.
You have to feel bad for the baby blue “S” with its lazy ringtone. Skype was an early example of a tech product that was so ubiquitous it was even used as a verb – users would ‘Skype’ someone in much the same way they would ‘Google’ something.
So long, Skype. It was nice chatting with you.
[Source: Business Standard]
