Skype — The App That Made Calling a Verb, Folded Into Teams

Skype was the service that taught the world it could call anyone, anywhere, for free over the internet — and on May 5, 2025 Microsoft switched it off and folded its users into Teams. Launched on August 29, 2003 by the Swedish entrepreneur Niklas Zennström and the Dane Janus Friis, built by a team of Estonian engineers, Skype turned a personal computer into a phone. “To Skype” became a verb; a grandparent video-calling grandchildren across an ocean became, for a while, the defining image of what the consumer internet was for. At its height around 2013 Microsoft reported some 300 million monthly users.

Skype’s commercial history was a relay of owners who struggled to know what they held. In September 2005 eBay bought it for roughly $2.6 billion, on a theory — that buyers and sellers would want to talk — that never materialized; it took a $1.4 billion writedown in 2007 and sold most of its stake in 2009. In May 2011 Microsoft acquired Skype for $8.5 billion, its largest purchase to that point, and wired it into Windows, the Xbox, and Office; for a few years Skype was simply how people made internet calls.

Then the ground shifted. Apple’s FaceTime made video calling a default on every iPhone; WhatsApp made free calls and messages frictionless for billions; Zoom became the verb of the pandemic that Skype should have been; and Microsoft’s own Teams, launched in 2016, steadily annexed the use cases Skype had pioneered. By 2023 its daily users had fallen to around 36 million, even as Teams crossed hundreds of millions.

On February 28, 2025 Microsoft announced that Skype would retire on May 5, 2025, with users migrated to the free version of Teams or able to export their data. The fate is “Merged” rather than “Shut Down” only on a technicality: contacts and chats carried over to Teams, but the standalone product that invented mass consumer VoIP, after 22 years, was gone. Skype was killed less by any single rival than by the entire category it had created, and finally by the owner that decided one free communications app was enough.