This afternoon Skype announced on X that from the 5th of May it would cease to be available.
I have to admit to a nostalgic pang of the heart, until I realised I haven’t even logged into Skype since well before the pandemic… probably much longer, I really can’t remember when I last used it. And that’s pretty shocking because Skype was the original communication tool, coming some time after Yahoo! Messenger and before WhatsApp took over and well before the likes of Zoom, Meet and Teams.
First released on the 29th of August 2003, Skype was acquired by eBay in 2005 for $2.6 billion and touted as the ‘Power of Three’ in the Meg Whitman days. eBay, PayPal and Skype were going to rule the world, until eBay decided the risk of people simply completing off-eBay deals on Skype made it too much of a risk to be integrated.
Long story short, eventually in 2011 Microsoft bought Skype for $8.5 billion and it’s future once again looked bright but that future is now over with users being told they can migrate to Teams.
In order to streamline our free consumer communications offerings so we can more easily adapt to customer needs, we will be retiring Skype in May 2025 to focus on Microsoft Teams (free), our modern communications and collaboration hub.
– Microsoft
It’s a tough pill to swallow, Skype not only allowed peer to peer voice calls, they also had SkypeOut making it cheap to call anyone with a phone number anywhere in the world. International call tariffs could be torn up as you could make calls, often for free. But they stagnated for too long and when Zoom and Meet came along the signs were clear that Skype wouldn’t survive and would one day disappear. That day comes on the 5th of May 2025.
