Luxembourg: Skype users bade farewell to the online communication service Monday, reminiscing about late-night calls with friends, long-distance dates and free catch-ups with far-flung family moments.
Microsoft, its owner, has shuttered the service to focus on its alternative calling service, call Team. The decision to scrap Skype, announced in March, caps a remarkable 21-year run for a software that for many embodied the early values of the open internet: It was mostly free, had a user-friendly interface and made it easier for people to connect across the world. In its heyday, Skype had over 300 million users.
But the service failed to adapt to evolving consumer needs, and many users complained that it could be clunky to access and lag when large numbers of users logged onto a single call. During the pandemic, as global demand for online calls surged, many users instead flocked to a growing number of rivals to work remotely and catch up with friends and family. It is important to mention that Skype was founded 21 years ago and purchased by the computing giant for $8.5 billion in 2011, at the time its biggest acquisition to date. Microsoft is encouraging Skype’s remaining users to migrate to Teams, its calling service that it says offers many of the same calling and messaging functions, but there are also plenty of other free alternatives. Skype for Business, a separate service, will remain functional, it said.
“Skype was a broadening of horizons in my mind,” technology journalist and broadcaster Will Guyatt said in a phone interview Monday, recalling how he became a user when it first launched. At the time, he said, it was a novel way to keep in touch with friends who had moved abroad or were travelling. “It was quite eye-opening — the fact that you could make decent calls to people on computers and then pretty soon after that solid video calls,” he recalled.
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