The software giant Microsoft announced on Friday that it was retiring Skype, the online voice and video communication pioneer that it had purchased in 2011.
Skype support said on X that “Starting in May 2025, Skype will no longer be available,” advising customers to log into Microsoft’s Teams platform to continue using its services.
Skype was established in Estonia in 2003 by Scandinavians Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. Skype revolutionised internet communication by providing free voice calls between computers and reasonable prices for calls to landlines and mobile phones.
Video calls, instant messaging, file sharing, and group communication services were added to Skype as internet speeds increased over time.
The fact that 50 million people had signed up for Skype by 2005 shows how quickly it was adopted around the world.
Skype was purchased by online auction site eBay in 2005 for about $2.6 billion, but the anticipated synergies never materialised. In 2009, eBay sold the majority of its shares to a consortium of investors, who then sold the company to Microsoft.
Skype has struggled to maintain its position in the face of emerging competitors like Microsoft’s Teams and WhatsApp, which is owned by Meta, particularly with the advent of smartphones.
“As we’ve developed Teams over the past seven or eight years, Jeff Teper, head of Microsoft 365 collaboration apps and platforms, told CNBC, “We’ve learnt a lot from Skype.”
“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.”
“Sky peer-to-peer,” the technology that was essential to Skype’s initial design, is where the term “Skype” originates.
One of the main innovations that enabled Skype to grow quickly in its early years was the peer-to-peer component, which dispersed the network needs across users’ computers rather than depending entirely on centralised servers.
