Microsoft has announced that it will be retiring Skype, the pioneering online voice and video calling platform it acquired in 2011. According to a post on Skype’s support page on X, Skype will be discontinued starting May 2025, with users directed to Microsoft Teams for continued services.
Skype was founded in 2003 by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis in Estonia, revolutionizing internet communication by offering free voice calls between computers and affordable rates for calls to landlines and mobile phones.
As internet speeds improved, Skype evolved to include video calls, instant messaging, file sharing, and group communication features. By 2005, Skype had reached 50 million registered users, showcasing its rapid global adoption.
In 2005, eBay acquired Skype for approximately $2.6 billion, but the expected synergies never materialized. In 2009, eBay sold a majority stake in Skype to a group of investors, who later sold it to Microsoft.
In recent years, Skype struggled to maintain its dominance against newer competitors like Meta’s WhatsApp, Zoom, and Microsoft’s own Teams. The name “Skype” came from “Sky peer-to-peer,” the technology behind Skype’s initial architecture. This peer-to-peer model distributed network demands across users’ computers, rather than relying solely on centralized servers, enabling Skype’s rapid growth in its early years.
