Microsoft will end Skype in May, leaving some users upset

Skype, the pioneering and once ubiquitous free video calling service, will be history come May. It was so popular that people used it as a verb: “I’ll Skype you in the morning.”

Microsoft, which acquired Skype in 2011 for $8.5 billion, announced in a post on X on Friday that the iconic voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP) service would soon go dark. It encouraged Skype users to instead migrate to a free version of Microsoft Teams — a communication app that helps users work together in real time.

In the more than two decades since it was founded, Skype has been largely overtaken by a bevy of competitors, such as FaceTime, WhatsApp, Zoom and Slack.

In a separate blog post, Microsoft said the move to shutter Skype was meant “to streamline our free consumer communications offerings so we can more easily adapt to customer needs.”

Speaking to CNBC, Jeff Teper, president of Microsoft 360 collaborative apps and platforms, said the company had “learned a lot from Skype over the 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.”

Not everyone is happy about the impending change. “This is shocking,” a user named Maphry wrote in a post on X. “There are so many elderly who are not happy to change technologies anymore, but are used to this one over decades to keep in touch with their loved ones. It will require a lot of effort (usually by their families) to bring them over to alternatives.”

Another X user said: “My best friend and I have long distance chatted with Skype several times a week for 5 years. This is actually so upsetting.”

Skype, founded in 2003 by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, was one of the first video conferencing apps, also allowing users to make voice calls and send messages. In 2005, it was bought by eBay for $2.6 billion, but just two years later, the online auction company took a $1.4 billion write-down of Skype, acknowledging that the acquisition “had not performed as expected.”

In 2009, eBay sold its controlling interest to a group of investors, who subsequently sold Skype to Microsoft. At the time, it was Microsoft’s largest acquisition. NPR’s Planet Money reported in 2011, “The growth now is in smartphones and tablets — where Microsoft is getting clobbered by Apple (obviously) and Google (whose Android mobile operating system is wildly popular). This, as much as anything, explains why Microsoft is paying $8.5 billion for Skype, a company that lost money last year, and that most people use for free.”

Skype had been gradually losing users for years, going from about 40 million in March 2020 to 36 million in 2023.