The internet says goodbye to Skype, and thanks for all the calls

Skype users bade farewell to the online communication service Monday, reminiscing about late-night calls with friends, long-distance dates, and free catch-ups with far-flung family — along with pixelated faces and “Can you hear me?” moments. Microsoft, its owner, has shuttered the service to focus on its alternative calling service, Teams.

The decision to scrap Skype, announced in March, caps a remarkable 21-year run for a software that for many embodied the early values of the open internet: It was mostly free, had a user-friendly interface, and made it easier for people to connect across the world. In its heyday, Skype had over 300 million users.

But the service failed to adapt to evolving consumer needs, and many users complained that it could be clunky to access and lag when large numbers of users logged onto a single call. During the pandemic, as global demand for online calls surged, many users instead flocked to a growing number of rivals to work remotely and catch up with friends and family.

Skype was founded 21 years ago and purchased by the computing giant for $8.5 billion in 2011, at the time its biggest acquisition to date.

Microsoft is encouraging Skype’s remaining users to migrate to Teams, its calling service that it says offers many of the same calling and messaging functions — but there are also plenty of other free alternatives. Skype for Business, a separate service, will remain functional, it said.

“Skype was a broadening of horizons in my mind,” technology journalist and broadcaster Will Guyatt said in a phone interview Monday, recalling how he became a user when it first launched. At the time, he said, it was a novel way to keep in touch with friends who had moved abroad or were traveling. “It was quite eye-opening — the fact that you could make decent calls to people on computers and then pretty soon after that solid video calls,” he recalled. “It made it simple and easy to do.”

The news of Skype’s closure prompted a flood of nostalgia from other users online. For some millennials, Skype’s heyday coincided with coming-of-age moments, and its familiar bubbly ringtone conjured up core memories.

“Goodbye folks. It’s been a long, productive relationship. To finding love, to interviewing for the first job and many many more,” wrote one user on Reddit.

“The hardest part is going to be teaching my [technologically] inept parents how to use a new app,” joked one commenter in response.

“Many memories were shared through late-night calls and laughter. You connected us across miles and time zones. Goodbye, old friend,” wrote one user in a tribute to Skype shared on X.

“Goodbye, Skype … You stuttered, you froze, and you disconnected … But, you served us well in times of need,” another said.

Others expressed disappointment with Microsoft’s decision to not refund Skype credit to some users. The company said it will add an option for Skype account holders to keep using their funds for phone calls online or in Teams.

Skype was founded in Tallinn, Estonia, in 2003, by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. The service’s VoIP technology allowed free calls between Skype users, bypassing traditional phone companies and their expensive call rates. For a fee, users could also call traditional telephone numbers from a Skype account. In 2005, eBay bought Skype for $2.6 billion and later added video calls.

Skype ultimately failed to keep up with rivals — most notably Zoom, but also other services offered by Cisco, WhatsApp, Google, and Apple — at the same time as its owner Microsoft invested heavily in Teams. By 2023, Skype’s number of daily users had dropped to 36 million, the company said at the time.

Guyatt, the tech journalist, said Microsoft initially invested in new features for Skype but ultimately neglected it in favor of Teams. As a result, Skype failed to keep up with shifting consumer habits, and that became obvious during the pandemic. He said it was difficult to jump onto a Skype call quickly because it required a Microsoft login, and the tool focused on calls between two users, as opposed to the digital meeting rooms that people had grown accustomed to.

“Microsoft fiddled around improving the video quality, but didn’t offer loads of new features, and that’s where ultimately it lost out,” Guyatt said. “People had better features on other services.”