Skype is closing. Microsoft said it will retire the calling app on May 5, 2025, 23 years after Skype started the market for making calls over the internet. Users got 10 weeks from the announcement to decide what to do with their accounts.
The company is putting everything behind Teams. “At this point, putting all our focus behind Teams will let us give a simpler message and drive faster innovation,” Jeff Teper, president of Microsoft 365 collaborative apps and platforms, told TechCrunch.
What users can do
Before May 5, Skype users can log into Teams with their Skype credentials, and their chats and contacts move over automatically. The other route is Skype’s built-in export tool, though TechCrunch noted there is probably little users can do with the exported file. Microsoft is steering people to Teams Free, which adds things like calendar integration but lacks Skype’s calls to mobile and landline numbers.
Those phone features were already being wound down. In December 2024, Microsoft stopped letting users add credit or buy Skype numbers. Subscription renewals end on April 3. For people with credit left, a Skype Dial Pad will stay available in the Skype web portal and in Teams. “We’ll support [this] as long as users have credit and they’re using this functionality,” said Amit Fulay, Microsoft’s VP of product. Teams Free will not support PSTN calling, he said, because people now have mobile data plans and usage has changed.
Anyone who does nothing by May 5 will have their data kept until the end of the year, then deleted, according to Skype.
A long decline
Skype listed 560 million registered users and 124 million monthly active users when it filed for an IPO in 2010. Microsoft bid $8.5 billion for it in 2011, and it peaked at 300 million users in 2013. The last figure Microsoft gave was in early 2023: more than 36 million daily users. Skype jumped 70% month on month to 40 million daily users in March 2020, as lockdowns pushed people online, then flattened.
Teams, launched in 2016 and 2017 by different accounts, took over the role. Microsoft chose it as the integrated communications app on Windows 11 in 2021, which pushed Skype aside. Teper said consumer calling minutes in Teams have grown fourfold in the two years since the Teams desktop and web app was rebuilt. Teams has 320 million users, though he would not say how many are consumers.
“We’ve thought about [shutting down Skype] for a while,” he said, “but we really felt like the product had to show the end-user adoption with consumers telling us it was ready.”
Fulay said the goal during the move is that people do not lose their contacts or memories. “If they choose to come to Teams, we’ll restore all of their contacts and data.”
Sources
- Microsoft to Shut Down Skype in May 2025, Shifting Focus to Teams
- Microsoft hangs up on Skype: Service to shut down May 5, 2025 | TechCrunch
