Microsoft has announced it is shutting down the popular video calling service Skype.
Skype’s two billion users will no longer have access to their accounts starting on May 2025, marking the end to a 21-year run.
Microsoft is now encouraging users to migrate to its free Teams app.
‘Over the coming days you can sign in to Microsoft Teams Free with your Skype account to stay connected with all your chats and contacts. Thank you for being part of Skype,’ the video calling service posted on X Friday.
Users will also be able to export their Skype data during this time. Microsoft will stop selling monthly Skype subscriptions, but users with credits can continue using them in Teams.
Skype launched in 2003 and quickly gained popularity as a way for people to talk to each other without paying a phone company.
But once the smartphone-era hit, its users declined and this was exacerbated as similar services such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams gained popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic.
‘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, told CNBC.
Microsoft has announced it is shutting down the popular video calling service Skype
‘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.’
In 2023, Skype had 36 million daily active users, down from 40 million in 2020, according to Microsoft.
Meanwhile, the number of minutes people have spent on Teams calls has quadrupled over the last two years, Teper told CNBC.
It’s not clear how many active Skype users there are today, so it’s difficult to say how many people will be impacted by the shut down.
At its peak in 2016, Microsoft said the calling service had over 300 million users.
‘We know this is a big deal for our Skype users, and we’re very grateful for their support of Skype and all the learnings that have factored into Teams over the last seven years,’ Teper told TechCrunch.
Microsoft launched Teams in 2016 to build a platform that would allow for cloud communication and collaboration across the company’s apps and others.
After a 21-year run, Skype’s 2 billion users will no longer be able to access their accounts starting on May 2025
But this new system was in direct competition with Skype.
Just two years after the tech giant launched Skype for Business in 2015, it announced plans to retire the service and ultimately did so in 2021.
Skype was officially sidelined when Microsoft selected teams as the integrated communications app of choice on Windows 11 that same year.
Last December, Microsoft gradually began phasing Skype out by removing the ability for users to add credit to their accounts or purchase Skype phone numbers, pushing monthly subscriptions and Skype-to-phone plans instead.
Over the last two years, Microsoft has been steadily rolling out a new-and-improved Teams desktop and web app.
‘It’s at a high-enough scale that we feel great about the app [Teams] for personal use,’ Teper said.
‘We feel we have the mileage under our belt on the adoption by consumers, [who are] using Teams in their personal lives.
‘We’ve thought about [shutting down Skype] for a while, but we really felt like the product had to show the end-user adoption with consumers telling us it was ready.’
