Obsolete: Skype To Shut Down

Uploaded on 2025-03-03 in BUSINESS-Services-IT & Telecoms, FREE TO VIEW

The video calling service Skype, that has had hundreds of millions of users, will close on May 14th 2025, its owner Microsoft has said.

Skype has been the go-to calling App for many for decades. Now, Microsoft is shuttering the popular App and moving users to Microsoft Teams.

Skype was one of the world's most popular websites and allowed people to make free voice calls via their computers to friends and family all over the world.

The most recent user numbers, from February 2023, showed Skype was used by 36 million people each day, and at its peak, was one of the most popular tools on the internet, becoming the go-to platform in the early days of online video calls in the 2000s and 2010s.

Skype was not the first or only company offering this service, but by allowing the public to make computer-to-computer calls free, it helped popularise the concept.

Skype said on X.com that users can sign in to Microsoft Teams with their account to stay connected with all their chats and contacts.

Skype was bought by Microsoft in 2011 for $8.5bn (£6.1bn), its biggest-ever acquisition at the time.

Skype became integrated with Microsoft’s other products such as Xbox and Windows devices.

When Microsoft bought Skype, the company was buying into an app that had been downloaded one billion times and had hundreds of millions of users.

But as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger grew in popularity, Skype was waning.

In 2017, Microsoft redesigned Skype, but users were not happy.

When Microsoft announced Windows 11, its new operating system, it stated that Microsoft Teams would be integrated by default, while Skype, for the first time in years, was not.

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