Microsoft to discontinue Skype after more than 20 years – News

Microsoft Corp. today announced plans to discontinue Skype and direct the service’s users to Microsoft Teams, its flagship communications platform. 

Skype will officially shut down on May 5.

The service is winding down 22 years after its release by a Luxembourg-based software startup. Skype experienced rapid growth in its first decade, growing to 560 million registered accounts and 124 million monthly active users by 2010. The company was sold twice along the way: for $2.6 billion in 2005 and at a $2.75 billion valuation four years later.

Skype received its biggest valuation in 2010, when it was bought by Microsoft for $8.5 billion. The deal marked the software and cloud computing giant’s largest acquisition up to that point. 

In the years that followed the transaction, Microsoft phased out its internally developed communications platforms to refocus entirely on Skype. In the consumer market, the company discontinued the Windows Live Messenger application it had released at the turn of the millennium. Microsoft later merged its Lync business communications platform with Skype into a new product called Skype for Business. The latter offering was discontinued in 2021. 

The company is now shutting down the consumer version of Skype for the same reason it discontinued Windows Live Messenger and Lync. Microsoft is looking to prioritize a more popular communications product, namely Microsoft Teams. The Slack alternative topped 320 million monthly active users in 2023, about 10 times the number of users that Skype had at the time. 

“In the past two years, the number of minutes spent in meetings by consumer users of Teams has grown 4X, reflecting the value Teams brings to everyday communication and collaboration,” Jeff Teper, president of Microsoft’s Collaborative Apps and Platforms business, wrote in a blog post today. 

Microsoft quietly began shutting down Skype late last year. In December, users noticed that the company had stopped selling Skype phone numbers and Skype Credits, a tool for calling mobile devices and landlines. Earlier this week, Microsoft released a preview version of an upcoming Skype update with a notification that read “Starting in May, Skype will no longer be available.”

The blog post in which the company confirmed the move today detailed that it will sync Skype accounts to Teams. 

Initially, Microsoft will enable a limited number of users to log into Teams using their Skype account credentials. It plans to roll out the integration to the rest of the Skype installed base in the coming days. Account data such as chats and contacts will be automatically synced to Teams. 

Users who don’t wish to switch have access to a tool for downloading account data. Microsoft plans to delete that data at the end of the year. Meanwhile, customers with paid Skype accounts will have access to premium features until their subscriptions expire. 

Image: Microsoft