Microsoft to kill Skype and force people to use Teams – UK Times

Microsoft is finally killing off Skype.

The video calling app has existed for more than 20 years and was at one point so dominant that it was used as the generic term for a video call.

But in the years since a variety of other services – from WhatsApp to Apple’s iMessage, as well as work-focused alternatives such as Zoom – have taken its place, and its use has declined.

Now Skype’s owner Microsoft says it is shutting down the service.

Users can either choose to export their data and move on or move it to Microsoft’s Teams, which offers many of the same chat and calling features. Microsoft will offer a migration service on Teams, so that group chats and similar existing data can be moved across.

Teams will not however offer the ability to call traditional phone numbers. Early on, that was one of the central features of Skype.

Skype will be online until 5 May, giving users about 60 days to decide what to do with their chats and move them over.

Founded in 2003, Skype’s audio and video calls quickly disrupted the landline industry in the early 2000s and made the company a household name boasting hundreds of millions of users at its peak. But the platform has struggled to keep up with easier-to-use and more reliable rivals such as Zoom and Salesforce’s Slack in recent years.

The decline was partly because Skype’s underlying technology was not suited for the smartphone era.

When the pandemic and work-from-home fueled the need for online business calls, Microsoft batted for Teams by aggressively integrating it with other Office apps to tap corporate users – once a major base for Skype.

To ease the transition from the platform, its users will be able to log into Teams for free on any supported device using their existing credentials, with chats and contacts migrating automatically.

With that, Skype will become the latest in a series of high-flying bets that Microsoft has mishandled, such as the Internet Explorer web browser and its Windows Phone. Other big tech firms have also struggled with online communication tools, with Google making several attempts through apps including Hangouts and Duo.

Microsoft declined to share the latest user figures for Skype and said there would be no job cuts due to the move. It added that Teams has about 320 million monthly active users.

When Microsoft bought Skype in 2011 for $8.5 billion after outbidding Google and Facebook – its largest deal at the time – the service had around 150 million monthly users; by 2020, that number had fallen to roughly 23 million, despite a brief resurgence during the pandemic.

Microsoft said on Friday “Skype has been an integral part of shaping modern communications”.

“We are honored to have been part of the journey.”

Additional reporting by agencies