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Microsoft Shuts Down Skype After 20 Years
Microsoft announced on Friday that the Skype application will cease operations on May 5th, as the company has decided to retire the internet calling service after two decades significantly impacting communication across borders.
The tech giant clarified that shutting down Skype will allow Microsoft to focus its efforts on "Teams," which has been developed internally, thereby simplifying its communications offerings.
Founded in 2003, Skype quickly revolutionized the communications landscape by providing voice and video calls, disrupting traditional landline services in the early 2000s. The name Skype became familiar in households after its user base reached hundreds of millions, according to Reuters.
However, the platform has faced challenges in recent years in keeping up with competition from easier-to-use and more reliable tools such as Zoom and Slack from Salesforce. This decline is partly attributed to the incompatibility of Skype's underlying technology with the smartphone era.
As the COVID-19 pandemic increased demand for online business calls, Microsoft aggressively promoted "Teams" by integrating it with other Office applications to attract users who were once part of Skype's substantial user base.
To facilitate the transition to "Teams," Skype users will be able to log in for free on any device using their existing credentials, with chats and contact information transferred automatically.
The shutdown of Skype is part of a series of significant investments that Microsoft has struggled to manage, including the Internet Explorer browser and the Windows Phone operating system. Additionally, many large companies have faced challenges in developing online communication tools, evident from Google's attempts with applications like Hangouts and Duo.
Microsoft has declined to disclose the latest user numbers for Skype, assuring that there will be no job cuts as a result of this move, noting that "Teams" currently boasts approximately 320 million active users monthly.
When Microsoft acquired Skype in 2011 for $8.5 billion, surpassing offers from Google and Facebook in what was its largest deal at the time, about 150 million people were using the service each month. By 2020, that number had dwindled to around 23 million, despite a brief resurgence during the pandemic.
On Friday, Microsoft stated, "Skype has been an integral part of shaping modern communications... We are honored to have been part of this journey."
