Say Goodbye to Skype

After kickstarting the market for making calls over the internet 23 years ago, Skype is closing down. Microsoft, which acquired the messaging and calling app 14 years ago, said it will be retiring it from active duty on May 5 to double down on Teams. Skype users have 10 weeks to decide what they want to do with their account. It’s not clear how many people are impacted. The most recent numbers that Microsoft had shared were in 2023, when it said it had more than 36 million users — a long way from Skype’s peak of 300 million users. Between now and May 5, users will have the option to migrate all their contacts and chat data over to Microsoft’s Teams platform. Alternatively, users can download their Skype data using the app’s built-in export tool. The news will come as little surprise to those who have followed Skype in recent years, and in many ways, the writing has been on the wall since 2016, when Microsoft debuted Teams.