Microsoft shuts down Skype
(MENAFN)
Microsoft has officially announced the shutdown of Skype on May 5, 2025, after nearly 22 years of service. The company is now focusing its efforts on promoting its Teams application instead.
Microsoft has officially announced the shutdown of Skype on May 5, 2025, after nearly 22 years of service. The company is now focusing its efforts on promoting its Teams application instead.
Skype was created in August 2003 by Niklas Zennstrom, Janus Friis, and a team of Estonian developers, offering users the ability to make free or affordable voice and video calls over the internet. The name "Skype" was derived from "sky peer-to-peer," a reference to how the service worked.
The platform quickly grew in popularity, allowing both Skype-to-Skype calls and calls to landlines and mobile phones. At its peak in the mid-2010s, Skype boasted over 300 million monthly users and was widely regarded as a leader in internet-based communication.
Over the years, Skype changed ownership several times before being acquired by Microsoft in 2011 for $8.5 billion. Since then, Microsoft has gradually shifted its resources to Teams, positioning it as the company’s primary communication platform for both business and personal use.
Competing services like Zoom, WhatsApp, FaceTime, and Google Meet led to a steady decline in Skype’s popularity. In February 2025, Microsoft announced Skype’s shutdown and encouraged users to transition to Teams, assuring them that their contacts and chat history would remain available for transfer until January 2026. After that, the data would be permanently deleted.
Despite the decline of Skype, many users have shared heartfelt messages online, calling its closure "the end of an era" and reminiscing about how it was one of the first ways they connected with others. One user expressed, “Fly high, frozen blue screen – you weren’t perfect, but you were our first.”
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