Skype Shuts Down Today (5 May), After 22 Years Of Service

Microsoft’s Skype communications service has reached the end of the line, after 20-year run for the once popular and pioneering VoIP app, with hundreds of millions of users.

It was in late February 2025 when Microsoft had confirmed that Skype (at one stage its biggest acquisition) would be retired on Monday 5 May – joining many other Microsoft products that have famously shutdown over the years.

Skype users are advised to download Microsoft Teams and login to it with their Skype credentials, so that their Skype contacts will transfer over to the Teams app.

Users can also sign in to the Skype export page using their Microsoft account, in order to save conversations and files. Skype data will be available until January 2026 for users to export or delete.

Skype shutdown

The end of Skype has been predicted for some time now, and rumours of its expected demise kicked up a notch in July 2019 when Microsoft began removing some of the functionality from the Android-based Skype client.

Skype had been officially launched as a voice-over-IP (VoIP) beta service on 29 August 2003 before the era of smartphones, and its history was actually rooted in a peer-to-peer music sharing program called Kazaa.

It was created by Swede Niklas Zennström and Dane Janus Friis, with software developed by Estonians Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu, Jaan Tallinn, and Toivo Annus.

By 2005 it was hugely popular for giving people a way to talk (even internationally) without paying expensive international call fees.

Indeed, at its peak Skype had hundreds of millions of users and became a verb – users said they would “Skype” someone.

It came to the attention of the auction website eBay, which purchased Skype for an eye watering $2.5bn (£2bn). eBay intended to integrate Skype into its auction process, but that never happened.

Several months after its acquisition by eBay, Skype introduced video calls for the very first time, and its popularity surged once again.

But Skype never sat easy within eBay and the firm later admitted it had overvalued the unit by around $900m, before offloading most of its stake to a venture capitalist.

Skype’s decline

In 2011 Microsoft acquired Skype for $8.5 billion – at the time its largest ever acquisition – and Redmond’s ownership was also not without its controversies.

With the arrival of the smartphone era and competition from the likes of Apple’s FaceTime, Meta’s WhatsApp, and Google’s various communications apps, Skype’s star began to wane.

Matters were not helped when Microsoft had redesigned Skype in 2017, that saw the addition of Snapchat-like features as part of a redesigned user interface.

That move angered many of Skype’s user base, who felt that the increasingly complicated features got in the way of Skype’s core uses of messaging and making phone calls.

And in 2018 Microsoft had hoped to update its desktop app to look similar to its mobile app, when it said that Skype 7.0 (Classic Skype) would be retired on 1 September 2018.

Want to know about the history of Skype? Read Silcion UK’s Tales In Tech History article about the former VoIP powerhouse.

Redmond had urged users to upgrade to Skype version 8.0 in order to avoid loss of service, but following angry responses from Skype users, Microsoft u-turned and promised not to axe support for Classic Skype.

Microsoft had faced a large number of holdouts for Classic Skype, as users were unhappy at the new version’s redesigned interface.

And users were also unhappy that Skype had become somewhat slow and bloated compared to quick and lean versions of the past.

In 2023, Microsoft said Skype had 36 million daily active users., which was down from 40 million in March 2020.

So today, 5 May, marks the end for the famous VoIP app.

Silicon UK thanks Skype for over two decades of service.

For those wishing to migrate to Teams, they can download the app here and login with their Skype credentials.