Microsoft announces shutdown of Skype
The pioneering internet calling service will end in May. Users are encouraged to move to the Teams app.
After more than 20 years, one of the first widely used services for internet calls will end in a few months.
Microsoft announced Friday that it will shut down Skype in early May, with users encouraged to move to the Teams app. The company is consolidating its video-connection applications because Teams has been growing quickly and has a wider suite of capabilities than Skype, according to Microsoft executive Jeff Teper.
“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,” Teper wrote in a blog post on Microsoft’s website.
Users will soon be able to log into Teams using their Skype credentials, according to the blog post. The company said Skype contacts and chat histories will migrate to Teams, and people also can export their Skype data.
In the 2000s, Skype became a popular service for direct calls over the internet, especially for people in different countries who could talk through Skype-to-Skype connections that avoided expensive per-minute phone fees for international calls.
Since it started in 2003, Skype has had multiple owners. Ebay bought it in 2005 for $2.6 billion and sold a majority stake in the service a few years later to a private group of investors. Microsoft acquired Skype in 2011 for $8.5 billion.