What happened to Skype?

A wave of nostalgia hit the internet on Monday after Microsoft officially pulled the plug on Skype, as announced by the company earlier this year.

What is Skype?

Founded in 2003 in Luxembourg, the blue cloud company pioneered peer-to-peer communication through voice and video calls over the web by using existing technology that converted audio and video into a digital signal.

Even though Skype wasn’t the first to offer immediate messaging, Skype’s ease of use and free of charge service made overseas communication available to anyone that had access to a laptop. The latter was particularly appealing to the masses during a time when international calls cost an arm and a leg.

How Skype helped people

Skype started at a time when voice and video-calling was not as ubiquitous as it is nowadays, basically an almost essential feature in every social media app.

Skype became the go-to for generations to come, from overseas families to long-distance lovers to job seekers and employers. It gained so much popularity that it started to be used as a verb.

A group of people that benefited greatly from Skype’s video-call service included the missionaries of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Before the church’s 2019 announcement about changes in communication that allowed missionaries to call and text home weekly, missionaries were permitted only two annual calls home.

Skype facilitated calls and video calls from the remotest places, or those with limited internet access.

“It’s what was most accessible where I was,” Utah native Mitchel Price, 26, said. He recalled using Skype for his biannual calls home while serving a full-time mission for the church in El Salvador and Belize from 2017 to 2019.

The fall of Skype after its ascent

Contrary to its quick growth, Skype’s decline was long in the making. Two years after launching, Skype had about 50 million registered users, which led to the subsequent acquisition by Ebay for $2.6 billion that same year. At its peak, it would hit an all-time high of over 300 million users.

Just six years later, in 2011, Microsoft acquired Skype for $8.5 billion. The tech giant absorbed the video-call service company and included it in its Microsoft Suite portfolio.

During this period, Microsoft also repackaged some of its own corporate video communication software, Lync, and rebranded it as Skype for business.

In 2017 Microsoft would later replace Skype for business with the videoconferencing software Teams, which integrated better within the Suite ecosystem.

Teams would then become Microsoft’s flagship communication hub for corporate video calls and collaboration.

Even though the recent pandemic that forced the world into online meetings seemed like the ideal chance for Skype’s resurgence, other competitors such as Zoom commanded the digital transition and pushed the once global go-to app for video calls out of the mainstream.

By 2023, the user base was down to 36 million users, well below its best years.

What the internet thinks of Skype shutting down

After the announcement was made, many people online reacted to the news of Skype shutting down.

“The Skype call music will still live on in my head and I probably haven’t used it for 15+ years,” one Reddit user wrote.

Today, the app that revolutionized leisure video communication is but a nostalgic memory.

What happens now that Skype has shut down

Microsoft is currently migrating all Skype users into Teams. Skype users will be prompted to log in to Teams, and they will be able to do so with their Skype credentials.

Once signed in, users have the option to sync their contacts. Those with a credit in their account can still access Skype’s dial pad for calls using the website, or Teams to make calls.

Skype numbers will not expire immediately, but those wishing to keep theirs should transfer to another provider or voice-over-internet services.

Some alternatives include Google Voice, Viber, Zoom Phone and Teams itself through Teams Phone. Take note that each option has different benefits and associated costs.

Just time will tell how these technologies will stand time and new inventions. As Price put it, “Skype just got replaced and that’s kinda how it goes.”