We were warned this day was imminent, and now it's here: Microsoft's Skype is no more. NPR reports that the mostly free phone- and video-calling app that's been around for more than two decades went offline permanently on Monday, with the company encouraging users to head over to its Teams platform instead. At its highest point, Skype, founded in Estonia in 2003, boasted more than 300 million users, per the Washington Post. But by last year, its daily number of viewers hovered at just 36 million, with video-calling and messaging competitors like Zoom, WhatsApp, and Slack sucking away its market share.
The app was sold to eBay in 2005 for $2.6 billion, which then sold its controlling interest to a group of investors in 2009, who in turn sold the app to Microsoft. Microsoft says Skype users should be able to transfer their contacts and chat messages over to Teams if they so wish. Some are now bidding a wistful goodbye to the app online. "Goodbye, Skype ... You stuttered, you froze, and you disconnected," wrote one fan on X. "But, you served us well in times of need."
Another observed on Reddit, per the Post: "The hardest part is going to be teaching my [technologically] inept parents how to use a new app." Some admirers even penned longer-form tributes: Writing for the Verge, David Pierce reflects on his time using Skype over the years in a bittersweet homage. "Skype still had users until the bitter end, but both Microsoft and the world had more or less moved on," he laments. "The technology that made Skype special two decades ago is now utterly commoditized, and maybe the world just no longer needed the company that made it all possible." More thoughts from Pierce here. (More Skype stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
