Skype users have until May 5 to decide what happens to their contacts, chat history and memories. Microsoft announced it is retiring the app on that date to concentrate on Teams, giving people 10 weeks to act. The service started the market for internet calling 23 years ago.
Nobody outside Microsoft knows how many people this affects. The company’s last public figure, from 2023, was more than 36 million daily users, a long way below the peak of 300 million reached in 2013. In early 2023 a blog post about a Skype and Bing integration said “more than 36 million people use Skype daily to connect through phone calls and chats.”
What users can do
Until May 5, people can log into Teams with their Skype credentials and have chats and contacts carried over automatically. The Skype app keeps working alongside it through that date. The other choice is the built-in export tool, though the exported data has few places to go. Microsoft is steering people to Teams Free, which has calendar integrations Skype lacks, but not the calling of mobile and landline numbers, nor Skype phone numbers.
“We wanted to make sure that during this transition, people aren’t losing their contacts, their memories,” said Amit Fulay, Microsoft’s VP of product. “We want to make sure we preserve all the things people have shared.” Anyone who does nothing by May 5 will have data kept until the end of the year, then deleted.
Paid calling is winding down on its own schedule. Microsoft stopped new credit purchases and Skype number sales in December 2024, and subscription renewals end on April 3. People with credit left will get a Skype Dial Pad, in the web portal and in Teams, for as long as they use it. Fulay said Teams Free will not support public switched telephone network calling, partly because habits have changed. “People have mobile data plans, and when this functionality came out many years ago, that wasn’t the case.”
Why now
The writing was on the wall from 2016, when Microsoft introduced Teams. The company began phasing out Skype for Business in 2017 and finished in 2021, the year it made Teams the built-in communications app on Windows 11.
Jeff Teper, president of Microsoft 365 collaborative apps and platforms, told TechCrunch the company had considered closing Skype for a while but wanted to see consumers adopt Teams first. Consumer calling minutes in Teams have grown fourfold in the two years since the rebuilt desktop and web app arrived, he said. “Skype took a bump, as did Teams, during the pandemic, and Skype has largely been pretty stable in the last couple of years,” Teper said. “And we felt the time, and the feedback, was such that we could make the move.” He added that putting all focus behind Teams “will let us give a simpler message and drive faster innovation.” He declined to say how many consumers are among Teams’ 320 million users.
Skype’s history explains some of the shrinkage. When it filed for an IPO in 2010 it reported 560 million registered users and 124 million monthly active users. Microsoft then bid $8.5 billion for the company in 2011. Smartphones and new messaging apps took a toll afterward, and WhatsApp passed 2 billion users in 2020. In March 2020, at the start of the pandemic, Skype jumped 70% month-on-month to 40 million daily users.
Whether the Teams name suits families is an open point. Teper pointed to Word, Excel and PowerPoint, which serve work and home alike. “We have kids and parents doing their homework in Word, and budgets in Excel,” he said.
