Skype dead at 22

Today, Microsoft shuttered Skype. The 22 year old telecommunications program is survived by its many successors, including the detestable Microsoft Teams.

Skype was first released in 2003, and was sold three times over the next decade: first to eBay, then to the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, before finally entering the Microsoft family of products in an $8.5 billion acquisition in 2011. In its prime, it boasted well over a hundred million monthly users.

For people of a certain age—those of us who were too young and/or too normie to have TeamSpeak or Ventrilo habits, to be specific—Skype was, for a time, the default in digital communications. It was an all-in-one package of instant messaging and high-quality voice and video calls, even if nobody had good enough microphones for that quality to matter.

And it was everywhere, on computers and phones and Xboxes and PlayStation Vitas. Skype was a forerunner, an institution, an omnipresence so pervasive in daily life that—even a decade after I used it with any regularity—its ringtone still grabs my attention with an atavistic intensity.

While it was the early leader in online voice communication, Skype struggled to maintain its dominance. As years progressed, voice chat tech became ubiquitous on competing platforms. When there was an ever-increasing likelihood that whatever other service you used would have its own option for calling your friends, Skype gradually became vestigial.

Microsoft, meanwhile, seemed determined to make Skype as baffling as possible through constant UI revisions and feature bloat. The company still maintains its own grim tally of ephemeral Skype functionality, featuring now-removed features like “Skype Mojis” and “SkypeMe!” It had MySpace integration at one point. That alone should tell you plenty.

There was also something called Skype Qik. If you don’t know what that is, don’t worry. Nobody else did, either.

The advent of Discord in 2015 attracted a rapidly expanding userbase of gamers and the terminally online, further diminishing Skype’s dwindling relevance. By the Covid lockdown era, Skype had accumulated so many layers of cruft that—despite its near-universal brand awareness—people opted to use almost anything else. Zoom and Meet were ascendant.

Most of the people I knew who were interacting with Skype were grandmothers who didn’t know what FaceTime meant and people who occasionally found a Skype process running in their task manager when they hadn’t even realized it was still on their computer. By 2023, it was down to 36 million monthly users. Still a huge number, but not by Microsoft standards.

Microsoft announced it was retiring Skype in February. At time of writing, attempting to visit the Skype download page produces the equivalent of a 404 error. If your workplace is still using Skype for Business, however, you’re apparently still in the clear, as Microsoft says “Skype for Business users are separate from Skype Consumer and remain unaffected by this change.”

For the rest of us, Microsoft assures that our Skype contacts and chats will automatically be transferred to Microsoft Teams. If you’re not one of the dozen or so people for whom that idea has any appeal, you can also export your Skype data for your own purposes.