Microsoft is shutting down Skype after shopping for it 14 years in the past for $8.5 billion

Microsoft is pulling the plug on Skype, the pioneering Web telecommunications and video name platform it purchased practically 14 years in the past for $8.5 billion. 

“We will likely be retiring Skype in Could 2025 to deal with Microsoft Groups (free), our trendy communications and collaboration hub,” already utilized by a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands of individuals at work, college and residential,” Jeff Teper, president of collaborative apps and platforms on the Redmond, Washington-based software program firm, mentioned on Friday in a press release. 

Microsoft in late 2012 scrapped its personal instant-messaging software, Messenger, after shopping for Skype the prior yr. However within the greater than decade since, providers together with FaceTime, Messenger and WhatsApp have let folks join in ways in which made it troublesome for Skype to compete. 

The difficulties have been illustrated specifically throughout the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic that noticed folks caught at house flocking to Zoom. Microsoft launched Groups for shoppers in 2020, whereas saying on the time it remained dedicated to Skype.

Skype was launched in 2003 by entrepreneurs Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, with the corporate’s identify combining “Sky” with a reference to peer-to-peer networks, the know-how that throughout the dotcom growth turned an essential new manner for sharing on-line information and knowledge. 

The corporate’s founders first offered Skype to eBay in 2005 for $2.6 billion. Microsoft’s acquisition in Could of 2011, on the time the largest ever buy for the software program maker, gave it entry to a consumer base of about 170 million individuals who logged in to Skype every month. That rely morphed to greater than 300 million month-to-month customers by 2016, however had shriveled to 36 million in 2023, Microsoft mentioned.

These now utilizing Skype may have time to log in to the Microsoft Groups app and have their message historical past, group chats and contacts accessible with out having to create a further account, in accordance with Microsoft. Customers may choose to export their knowledge to a different app.

Skype will likely be accessible till Could 5, giving customers about two months to resolve which possibility they wish to take.