Microsoft on Friday announced that it is discontinuing Skype, the pioneering online voice and video calling service that the tech giant acquired in 2011.
"Starting in May 2025, services provided by Skype will be discontinued," stated a post from Skype support on social media, advising users to sign into Microsoft's Teams platform for continued use of its services.
Skype was launched in 2003 by Scandinavians Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis in Estonia, transforming internet communication by providing free voice calls between computers and low-cost options for calls to landlines and mobile phones.
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Over the years, as internet speeds have increased, Skype has developed to include video calls, instant messaging, file sharing, and group communication features.
By 2005, Skype had already gained 50 million registered users, clearly demonstrating its rapid global acceptance.
eBay acquired online communication platform Skype in 2005 for approximately $2.6 billion. However, the anticipated benefits from the acquisition did not materialize, and by 2009, eBay sold a majority stake to a group of investors, who subsequently sold it to Microsoft.
In recent years, particularly following the proliferation of smartphones, Skype has struggled to maintain its position as a leading video communication platform against newer competitors like WhatsApp, which is owned by Meta, and Microsoft's own Teams.
"We've gained a significant amount of knowledge from Skype as we've developed Teams over the past seven to eight years," Jeff Teper, president of Microsoft 365 collaborative apps and platforms, stated to CNBC.
We felt it was the right moment to simplify, making it easier for both the market and our customer base, and to bring about more innovation more quickly by focusing solely on Teams.
Microsoft stated that Skype group chats will be preserved during the transition to Teams, and for a 60-day period, messages on Microsoft and Teams will be synchronized so that you can send messages to contacts on Teams and they will reach friends still using Skype.
One major change is that Microsoft is removing Skype's phone capabilities, resulting in the loss of the ability to make calls to standard phone numbers, mobile phones, or place international calls through the service.
Microsoft stated that these features are no longer as pertinent in today's communication landscape, where mobile data plans are becoming increasingly affordable.
The name "Skype" originates from "Sky peer-to-peer", the technology that was crucial to Skype's original design.
The peer-to-peer approach was crucial as it distributed the network's demands across users' computers rather than relying solely on centralized servers, which was a key innovation that enabled Skype to scale rapidly during its early years.
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