It is the end of an era, as Microsoft has revealed that its plans to shut down Skype in the coming months, more specifically, in May 2025.
Spotted by a user inside one of the latest Skype for Windows previews, the message states that “Starting in May, Skype will no longer be available. Continue your calls and chats in Teams.”, followed up by a note saying: “{userCount} of your friends have already moved to Teams free”.
Launched back in 2003, Skype was acquired by Microsoft in 2011, and just several short years after that, it discontinued several in-house communication features such as the Windows Live Messenger.
Shortly after, in 2015, the Redmond company tried to integrate Skype into Windows 10, an integration that lasted just nine months. Redmond then tried to add several separate apps for messaging, phone calls, and video calls, only to remove them in the next update.
With the new update released in 2016, the company introduced a UWP app in a bid to move away from Win32, only to shut down UWP and return to Win32 once again.
Then, in 2017, Microsoft launched the collaboration platform Teams, a project built and inspired on the backbone of Skype, specifically created to compete with other similar platforms such as Slack.
Ever since the launch of Teams, Microsoft has been promoting the platform relentlessly. This is when the first rumors about Skype shutting down emerged, as during that time, the company retired Skype for Business.
Despite the millions of users and decades-long existence, Skype wasn’t really the groundbreaking platform that Microsoft envisioned, especially since competitors such as Apple and its FaceTime started to get traction and sway the users.
When Microsoft launched Windows 11 back in 2021, it also made sure to ship it with a free Teams integration, much like the way Windows 10 version 1511 shipped with Skype integration back in the day, hinting that the company is preparing to eventually kill off the platform.
Well, that day has finally arrived, as Microsfot now revealed that it will shut down Skype in May, meaning that it is very likely we will start seeing the notification message in the app itself very soon.
