After 23 years of service, digital calling pioneer Skype is shutting down on May 5th, 2025. Microsoft, which acquired the app in 2011, is jettisoning the program to allocate more resources to Teams. In 2023, the company claimed that the messaging app had 36 million users, a huge backslide from the 300 million users it boasted in its heyday.
“We know this is a big deal for our Skype users, and we’re very grateful for their support of Skype and all the learnings that have factored into Teams over the last seven years,” Jeff Teper, president of Microsoft 365 collaborative Apps and platforms, explained to TechCrunch. “At this point, putting all our focus behind Teams will let us give a simpler message and drive faster innovation.”
“It’s at a high-enough scale that we feel great about the app [Teams] for personal use,” Teper adds. “We feel we have the mileage under our belt on the adoption by consumers, [who are] using Teams in their personal lives. We’ve thought about [shutting down Skype] for a while, but we really felt like the product had to show the end-user adoption with consumers telling us it was ready.”
What This Means For Skype Users
This deadline gives users ten weeks to decide if they want to migrate their data over to the Teams platform. During the transition period, users will be able to log in to Teams with their Skype credentials, migrating all their chats and contacts automatically. Or they can download all their data using a built-in export tool. Even though, we can’t say we are sure where they would import it to.
“We wanted to make sure that during this transition, people aren’t losing their contacts, their memories,” says Amit Fulay, Microsoft VP of product. “We want to make sure we preserve all the things people have shared. And if they choose to come to Teams, we’ll restore all of their contacts and data.”
Any users that don’t take action by May 5th, will have their data retained until the end of the year, after which it will be deleted.
Why Now?
While the announcement may seem sudden, Microsoft launching Teams in 2016 pretty much sealed Skype’s fate. Since the app doesn’t allow collaboration across other apps and programs like Teams does. This is also after the company announced it would phase out Skype for Business in 2017, just two years after it was launched.
In December 2024, Microsoft stopped allowing Skype users to add credit to their accounts, or buy phone numbers. This move pushed users into monthly subscriptions and Skype-to-phone plans instead of more committal plans.
“Skype took a bump — as did Teams — during the pandemic, and Skype has largely been pretty stable in the last couple of years,” Teper said. “And we felt the time, and the feedback, was such that we could make the move.”
Microsoft is urging users to switch to Teams Free, which includes features like calendar integration, that Skype lacked. However, Teams Free cannot call mobile/landline numbers and receive phone calls with a Skype phone number. (Users with a valid monthly subscription can still use their Skype number, but that will end on April 5th).
For those with credit still on their account, Microsoft is offering a Skype Dial Pad for both the Skype web portal and Teams for an indefinite period.
“We’ll support [this] as long as users have credit and they’re using this functionality,” says Fulay.
