Skype joins the other pioneer software from the 2000s to become obsolete, as Microsoft announced that the IP-based voice call app will be shut down by May 2025 in favor of Microsoft Teams.
“Starting in May 2025, Skype will no longer be available,” said a post from Skype support on X.
The online voice and video call pioneer, founded and released in 2003 by Niklas Zennström, Janus Friis, and other developers in Estonia, transformed Internet communications during the mid-2000s. The name Skype was derived from “sky peer-to-peer,” the networking architecture used by the service during its development.
As Internet speed improved and adoption increased, Skype capitalized on this to add other features to its IP-based calls, such as video calls, instant messaging, and file sharing. By 2005, it had already reached the 50 million registered users mark.
The original founders would soon sell Skype to eBay for approximately $2.6 billion. However, the pioneer e-commerce platform had to sell a majority stake to a group of investors after the expected synergies with Skype didn’t work out. Microsoft eventually acquired Skype in 2011.
Microsoft would soon discontinue its own communication tools, including Windows Live Messenger. In 2014, the tech giant combined Skype with MS Lync as its enterprise software, which was eventually discontinued in favor of Microsoft Teams.
“We’ve learned a lot from Skype… as we’ve evolved Teams over the last seven to eight years. 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,” said Jeff Teper, president of Microsoft 365 collaborative apps and platforms.
In recent years, especially with the rise of smartphones and the pandemic, Skype has slowly given up its market share to rivals like WhatsApp and Zoom.
Microsoft has also planned MS Teams to become Skype’s successor, much like how Skype succeeded some earlier Microsoft communication tools.