Relegated to the shadow of Teams, undermined by technical problems and a disastrous redesign, Skype has become the spectator of its own fall.
It’s hard not to see this as a sign of certain death, especially in the midst of a pandemic, when the verb “skyper” was finally supposed to earn its place in the Oxford English Dictionary. In September 2020, at its annual developer conference, Microsoft devoted more than a hundred sessions to Microsoft Teams, with the aim of highlighting a dozen new features dedicated to its millions of users confined in spite of themselves, including the enrichment of Together Mode and the addition of meeting reports. During this event, which was particularly followed in the circle of power users, Skype was only entitled to one session, which “dealt with the migration to Teams, ” reports CNBC. “Microsoft seems to be announcing, in a barely veiled manner, the gradual disappearance of Skype,” the American media predicted.
A slow death in the shadow of Teams
And what was bound to happen, happened: after five years of living in the shadow of Teams, Skype is bowing out. As of Monday, May 5, 2025, the software, as famous for its haunting call melody as for having democratized technologies like VoIP and end-to-end encryption to the general public, is no longer accessible. A withdrawal justified, according to Microsoft, by the desire “to simplify [its] free consumer communication offers and better adapt to user needs,” we could read in a press release in February. Since the announcement, several million loyal users have been gradually invited to Teams, its alternative solution initially designed for businesses. And which had not really planned to welcome them initially, since it only allowed the creation of a personal account since 2020 and only introduced a link between professional and personal accounts very recently.
Microsoft had barely given any hints, even continuing to roll out new versions. But signs like the over-promotion of Teams at its annual conference, or the lack of real innovation in recent years, were quite telling: in the company’s mind, Skype had not survived the pandemic. “If there was ever a time for Skype to really take off, it was this year,” explained Microsoft corporate vice president Jim Gaynor after relegating it to the bench in September 2020. “The timing was perfect, the alignment was perfect for any online communications platform. If you can’t grow significantly and make your product thrive in that environment, it’s too late, you’ve missed your chance.”
The pandemic, a missed opportunity
It’s hard to argue with him. At the start of the pandemic, as remote working became widespread and wearing sweatpants during the day became socially acceptable, Skype had a real card to play. It even had a rare opportunity, in a sector where everyone dreads its expiration date, to regain ground on more innovative, more agile competitors, who had gradually eclipsed it over the years, from Zoom to WhatsApp to the short-lived HouseParty.
But instead of capitalizing on its historical strengths – audio and video calls renowned for their reliability and quality since the mid-2000s – and its duly acquired notoriety, “Skype lost its crown to Zoom” in the space of a few weeks, analyzed the specialized media WIRED, undermined by its numerous technical failures. “Zoom has become the emblem of videoconferencing, both among the general public and in the business world,” emphasized an analyst interviewed by the American media. “Many consider Skype to be a tool from another era .” In April 2020, undoubtedly aware of being left behind by Zoom, Skype had tried one last coup: deploying an option allowing to launch a video call from its web version, without needing to create an account or download the application, unlike its competitor launched in 2011 which still imposed these constraints on the meeting host. This did not prevent it from reaching 300 million active users in April 2020, according to Statista, compared to 40 million for Skype. And this, despite security problems regularly reported in the media.
Neither eBay nor Microsoft have been able to write Skype’s history.
By permanently closing Skype’s doors, Microsoft is confirming the failure of an acquisition that was, until the acquisition of LinkedIn in 2016, the most expensive in its history. Since the deal was announced in 2011, many observers questioned the relevance and cost of the operation, estimated at $8.5 billion and including the purchase of millions of Skype debts, while Microsoft already had Windows Live Messenger, which had several hundred million active users and integrated VoIP technology since version 8.0, as well as the Lync service for businesses. To justify the acquisition of this new toy, Microsoft mentioned, in a blog post, the numerous possible synergies with its products. And it was quick to take action: within a few months, Skype was successively integrated into Windows, Xbox Live, and the Office suite. It also took over Windows Live Messenger in 2013, then Lync in 2015.
By emphasizing Skype’s concrete contributions to its ecosystem, Microsoft was undoubtedly seeking to avoid repeating eBay’s mistakes, which had, very early on, identified the potential of this software to free itself from costly international calls, but without ever managing to take advantage of it. As Le Monde recalled in 2009, eBay had acquired Skype in 2005 for the tidy sum of 3.1 billion dollars, with the idea of integrating its technologies into a live auction module, a project that never saw the light of day. According to Les Échos, the idea of a voice chat, to replace email exchanges, had also been raised, with a model where eBay would have received remuneration each time a potential buyer used Skype to contact a seller, arguments which had “moderately convinced the markets”, reported the daily. Lacking synergies, and as its core business began to falter with the rise of Amazon, eBay decided to sell Skype—which was not, however, a “dead weight” economically speaking, Le Monde recalls— for $1.9 billion to a group of investors. At the time, Skype’s founders, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, even tried to buy their own company for a fraction of its initial price, by raising funds from investors. And they must have had a good nose, given what happened next.
“We were rebuilding the plane while we were flying it.”
Microsoft identified synergies, but quickly ran into technical hurdles. One of the most complex: dealing with the software’s peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture, in which each user acts as a node, capable of receiving and sending data, and where certain more powerful machines, supernodes, act as relay points to facilitate connections. This model was revolutionary when it was created in 2003, but less so in the era of the cloud and mobile applications. It was also difficult to secure or fully control.
As early as 2012, Microsoft came up with a temporary solution without disrupting the architecture: it hosted its own supernodes in secure data centers to improve the software’s stability and performance. “This didn’t change the fundamental nature of Skype’s peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture, in which supernodes simply serve to allow users to find each other,” a Microsoft spokesperson told ZDNet. Then, starting in 2013, the Redmond firm began a painful transition to the cloud, which was completed in 2016. A necessary shift, but one that led to numerous technical breakdowns and failures, which permanently tarnished the software’s image. “We were rebuilding the plane while we were flying it,” Gurdeep Pall, vice president in charge of Skype and Skype Business, fatalistically summed up.
Disastrous overhaul and change of atmosphere
As we take stock and write Skype’s obituary, it’s hard to ignore the risky choices made by the Redmond-based company, which is now more adept at capitalizing on its successful achievements than offering any significant innovation. One of the most memorable failures is undoubtedly the interface overhaul in 2017: rather than focusing on the technical problems that were piling up, Microsoft tried to relaunch the machine with a version inspired by Snapchat, integrating Stories and reaction emojis. The app’s rating then collapsed in the app stores, which forced it to deploy yet another redesign a year later.
One might legitimately wonder what the fate of this software, designed in Tallinn, Estonia, would have been if it had remained in the hands of its creators. Those who, in a way, offered Europe one of its rare competitive and sustainable products, capable of rivaling the giants of American technology. During a visit to the former Skype offices in Stockholm in early 2012, a journalist from The Verge was surprised to see how much the atmosphere contrasted with that of Microsoft headquarters. “There is no dress code, the walls are covered with acoustic panels and meetings are organized on the Skype network,” he wrote, before betting that the integration of the Estonian company into the corporate culture of its acquirer would be much more complicated than a software update.” It is clear that he was right.
