Skype joins MSN in messenger heaven after Microsoft officially ends its life

Microsoft has officially shut down Skype after the service pioneered the now diluted landscape of video chatting, marking the end of a 23-year-long era.

Skype joins MSN in messenger heaven after Microsoft officially ends its life
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TL;DR: Skype, a pioneer in internet video calling since 2003, has officially shut down after 23 years. Once boasting 300 million users and acquired by Microsoft in 2011, its popularity declined amid rising competition and pandemic-driven shifts. Microsoft now encourages users to migrate chats and contacts to Teams.

Skype has officially shut down after being one of the primary services people used to connect with each other for a staggering 23 years.

While Skype wasn't at the forefront of video calling services for those 23 years, it absolutely led the charge at the beginning of the rise of video calling. Skype was originally founded in 2003 by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who created the service to offer free phone calls over the internet, which later turned into video calls and a private messaging service.

Leading the charge of video calling over the internet, Skype had approximately 300 million users at one point, attracting eBay as a buyer in 2005, which purchased the company for $2.6 billion. Skype was later sold to a group of investors in 2009, and then to Microsoft in 2011 for $8.5 billion. Unfortunately for the legacy video calling service, popularity began to dwindle as more competition arose, and the final nail in the coffin was the beginning of the pandemic, when millions of people around the world flocked to services such as Zoom, WhatsApp, Slack, and Microsoft's own Teams for communication.

Skype's user base dropped from approximately 40 million users in early 2020 to 36 million in 2023. Microsoft is now telling Skype users to switch over to Teams, with the ability to automatically migrate all of their chats and contacts directly to Teams.