Microsoft To Shut Down Skype After 21-Years Of Service
This week, Microsoft announced that calling, video conferencing, and messaging service Skype will shut down on May 5th after 21-years of service. Microsoft is urging current Skype users to move to their other platform, Teams.
Skype was known as one of the first services that allowed people to call each other without paying a phone company. In today’s modern world, there are a multitude of ways for people to video chat with one another, so the company has become rather obsolete.
“We’ve learned a lot from Skype over the years that we’ve put into Teams as we’ve evolved teams over the last seven to eight years,” Jeff Teper, president of Microsoft 365 collaborative apps and platforms, said to CNBC.
“But we felt like now is the time because we can be simpler for the market, for our customer base, and we can deliver more innovation faster just by being focused on Teams.”
Microsoft said that current Skype users will be able to use their Skype credentials to log into, and use, Teams, and their contacts and chats will also be transferred over. Users will be able to export their Skype data.
“This is obviously a big, big moment for us, and we’re certainly very grateful in many ways,” Teper said.
“Skype pioneered audio and video calling on the web for many, many people.”
Microsoft initially acquired Skype back in 2011 for $8.5 billion from eBay. At the time, Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer said that:
“Microsoft and Skype together will bring together hundreds of millions or billions of consumers and empower them to communicate in new and interesting ways. At that point in time, Skype had about 170 million active users every month.
Around the same time, Apple’s iMessage and FaceTime began to become very popular and widely used.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, video chatting became the norm for communication, however, many workplaces utilized zoom, as well as traditional platforms like FaceTime.
In 2023, Microsoft stated that Skype had around 36 million daily active users, a 40 million decrease from March 2020.
“I think a good write-up of the history of the thing would mark the shift to mobile and cloud as a significant change in the communications category,” Teper said.
Eric Mastrota is a Contributing Editor at The National Digest based in New York. A graduate of SUNY New Paltz, he reports on world news, culture, and lifestyle. You can reach him at eric.mastrota@thenationaldigest.com.