RIP Skype

82 vitto_gioda 74 5/6/2025, 8:46:31 AM microsoft.com ↗

Comments (74)

colmmacc · 5h ago
Early one morning in August 2007 I was asleep in my apartment in Leiden and I got a call from my boss Dirk-Willem van Gulik to tell me that 1) Skype was having a global outage, 2) we had to help anyway we could, 3) scope, budget, people, nothing would get in our way.

At the time we were working on Joost, a crazy startup that was founded by Skype's Janus and Niklas. We built 3 networks, in 3 countries, in a matter of hours to host Skype super nodes. Apparently Skype had gotten into a retry storm due to a cascading failure because too many peer to peer super nodes had been taken offline at the same time. I think that Tuesday was Windows update day and maybe that was the straw that broke the camel's back. The small list of hard-coded super-super-nodes couldn't cope with the deluge. It took 3 days to get everything back and running, and for me it was the start of a fun collaboration with the team at Skype and eBay who were always nice.

Skype had sold to eBay for 2.6B in 2005. I don't think much diligence was done, and it didn't work out as a great integration for eBay. Then Skype was spun out and sold to Private Equity in 2009. The internet tells me that 65% was sold for 1.9B but I think there was some kind of write-down involved too. And then Microsoft bought Skype for 8.5B in 2009.

So you can have multi-day world-headline outages, be from and based in the EU, and still have 3 unicorn scale exits! There's a lesson in there about recoverable and resilient you can make a business with a great product and good leaders.

varjag · 4h ago
It's funny how eBay still did better stewardship of Skype than Microsoft.
dagaci · 3h ago
Some error corrections: ebay bought skype in 2005 for 2.6B (1 million concurrent user), and Microsoft bought them in 2011 for 8.5B (22 million concurrent users) with 74 million concurrent users reported in 2013 falling to apparently 30 million now...

https://www.statista.com/chart/1417/skype-usage/

What is your criteria for stewardship ?

varjag · 2h ago
Microsoft had essentially left it for dead shortly after the acquisition. There were multiple assassination attempts from Lyncs-become-Skype-for-Business-become-Teams department and I can only assume noone to fend for the foster child.

Skype under Microsoft had only seen sidelining and feature & platform regress, while it was a thriving product during eBay ownership. It may not be obvious from the bar graphs but it was apparent when one used the product.

aa-jv · 4h ago
Skype was an intelligence-gathering platform with very few equals. In the era that Skype was producing unicorn horns, surveillance capitalism was on a rocket ride.

I doubt those same conditions would allow for multiple unicorn horns in the modern era. You can't build a Skype-like surveillance network now; that horse has left the barn.

colmmacc · 3h ago
At its height Skype made its money in surprising ways. There was a margin on Skype credits, which paid for calls into the regular phone system. But there was much more money in brand licensing. Time was you could buy not just "Skype certified" headsets, cameras, but even non-telephony gear like USB thumb drives. SanDisk carried those for years and I presume they out-sold the alternatives enough to be worth the licensing.

It always amazed me. What did Skype have to say about a Thumb Drive. But the brand had a lot of trust. A lot of people appreciated how simple and reliable it was, and the fun blue interface was very comforting.

On the surveillance side, it was rumored that Microsoft bought Skype in part to do a solid for the US DOJ. DOJ would get a cooperative partner for lawful interception / metadata, while Microsoft might get some relief from their anti-trust woes. But all of the principals I've ever spoken to deny this as a motivation and nothing has come out over the years to contradict that.

I do recall Microsoft putting Skype in their ads org for a long time, but not much seemed to come from that either.

jgalt212 · 3h ago
> But the brand had a lot of trust.

Not for me. I always regarded it as one giant security hole in an era when Windows was riddled with them.

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westmeal · 4h ago
What about discord?
aa-jv · 4h ago
What about it? Nobody is going to buy it for billions of dollars, as has happened to Skype.

You can still do surveillance capitalism - its just not as valuable as it used to be ..

mid-kid · 3h ago
What are you talking about? Technology is as widespread as ever and chances to use AI for more effective surveillance and manipulation are through the roof.
ignoramous · 4h ago
> you can make a business with a great product

Depends on the market reach. A product struggling due to scale (a good problem to have: Like WhatsApp c. early 2010s during New Years) and a product that mostly does not do what it should (the very many dead WhatsApp clones) are very different things.

> a lesson in there about recoverable and resilient

I remember the time Skype was pre-installed on popular Androids (including the Kindle Fire) and yet couldn't compete with the likes of Viber, Kik, LINE, WeChat (which also came pre-installed). Think MSFT was that soft landing that broke that resilience.

> So you can have multi-day world-headline outages ... unicorn scale

I mean, us-east-1 is a prime example ;)

internet_points · 5h ago
Let's hope Teams is next in line
FunnyLookinHat · 4h ago
Everyone I know who uses Teams does not like it. Is that selection bias based on my personal network of technically savvy peers and professionals, or is it founded in a broader experience?

More importantly, does Microsoft really believe this is a winning product? Are they that out of touch with their customer base?

prepend · 4h ago
I’ve never met anyone who chose to use Teams. My organization forces me to use it. I don’t like it, but to its credit, it is better than “Skype for business.”

It’s strange to me how companies take these huge messaging brands and then just burn them down (Skype, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Google’s chatbominations, even AIM). As a user, they don’t fizzle out due to user disinterest, it’s always the owner just sort of doing away with it for something new.

Is there just not a financial model here? Cheap to run and lots of users but no money. Skype seemed to be profitable back when I would use it for international calling.

johannes1234321 · 4h ago
The issue is that they have working tools which work in one period, but fail to adapt to change.

AIM, Yahoo, MSN etc. were mostly plain text systems, built around presence and a single client. Then came mobile phones, with unreliable connections, with messengers which allowed integrating pictures etc. and easy sign up (iMessage by using apple ID, which every iPhone user has; Whatsapp by using phone number which directly linked the contacts), which worked without battery draining connection.

Skype originally worked by making random clients "super nodes" which coordinated the network, without needing a big data center managing it all. Making phones super nodes wasn't an option so they had to change their protocol in big ways.

So adapting was a cost and changed user experience, while newcomers grew.

In case of Google there was the addition of missing strategic leadership, where each team built their own new messenger, but nobody maintained any old one.

varjag · 3h ago
At any point of its existence and until its last hour, Skype was a better video call/chat product than Teams.
ptero · 3h ago
But that is not saying much. I wish the Teams goes the way of the dodo next.
_diyar · 3h ago
Accidental Tech Podcast episode 581 [1] had a great conversation about the reason why Teams is winning: Microsoft was using their dominant position in office applications to win market share.

Specifically, they would offer Teams for free in a bundle with Office (which basically every company buys anyway). Every manager could strike Slack from their expenses, replace it with Teams and claim great success.

Microsoft has since been forced to change their tactics [2-3], but the damage is done.

[1] https://overcast.fm/+AAQ2lFdljEs/40:32 [2] https://www.ft.com/content/be838956-7038-4179-8a1c-851b83048... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/25/business/european-union-m...

nunez · 1h ago
This was obvious, at least to me. MSFT has always offered Teams as a "free" add-on to O365 licenses. Google does the same with Meet and Workspace licenses.

It's a real shame, given that Zoom is leagues better than both solutions. But "free" is free :(

mrkeen · 3h ago
As of right now, search appears to be completely broken. I can see that the keyword I'm looking for is in the messages. But it won't show up via search (either from the top bar, or from the helpful "press ctrl-f to search within this channel" right-side-bar.)

The UI is aggressively debouncing, so it won't search again unless I change the query.

The UI message is "We couldn't find any results in this channel. Check for spelling, try another search keyword, or search in another channel."

Looking into the network response, I see some fun JSON:

  ...
  "error": {
        "code": "OK",
        "message": "The call failed, please try again.",
        "target": "",
        "details": [
            {
                "code": "OK",
                "message": "The call failed, please try again.",
                "target": "",
                "details": [
                    {
                        "code": "OK",
                        "message": "The call failed, please try again.",
                        "target": "",
                        "details": [
  ...
Spivak · 4h ago
Teams as a Zoom competitor is fine. It works perfectly well as video calling / conferencing software.

Teams as a Slack competitor is abysmal. Absolutely unusable for anything other than the most basic communication needs.

somefuckingguy · 4h ago
I think this is exactly why it's getting all the hate. People being forced to migrate from Slack to Teams. Not only do they lose years of archives, but the UX and features are a huge downgrade for such an essential tool.

If it was zoom -> teams, i don't think anyone would care so much.

dingnuts · 1h ago
zoom actually has a chat service that might be worse than teams, too
neilv · 3h ago
Most basic communication needs, if your basic needs don't include messages being communicated reliably.

Some people use these products to go through the motions of appearing to do work, and don't seem to be aware how ineffective they're being.

Whether MS office suites slot right in because the org is already dysfunctional, or whether the org is dysfunctional because MS office suites have made them that way over the years, I don't know.

seb1204 · 4h ago
I use teams, I don't get the hate but have also not use slack. Are there good videos about it?
rvba · 4h ago
Teams is a winning product.

It is not the best, but it offers just enough and is good enough that you dont want to spend on a separate dedicated product.

Especially as teams comes as a part of a bundle and is integrated with it.

I hate skype's interface (the is just so bad, even sharing screen), I also hate the sharepoint integration, but reality is that if you look at costs you will use it

Different thing is that windows 11 taskbar now has space for 11 windows open.. wow this is bad for any officr work

short_sells_poo · 4h ago
My guess is that for the VCs and PMs at Teams, it is easier to play politics and ensure your product is tightly integrated and coupled with other MS products, than to build an actual quality product.

It speaks of the culture at MS really, but it's amazing how a revenue and cash rich company can keep a dogshit product going.

I despise teams, all my colleagues despise teams, all my friends despise teams. It's a product that all users hate with amazing uniformity. But MS bundles it with Office, which makes demure and uninspired IT departments use it because it's less work.

sillystu04 · 5h ago
Skype could’ve become WhatsApp, Zoom, or Discord. In 2010 it was in the prime position to win any of those segments.
gregoriol · 5h ago
It was the "whatsapp" around 2010: everyone had an account on it, was using it's name as a word, ... and it was working really well at a time when it wasn't so common to use video chat, smartphones, ...

The story only repeats again though, like MSN messenger almost a decode before. Which one will be next?

seb1204 · 4h ago
ICQ not MSN Messenger I thought
rad_gruchalski · 3h ago
Msn messenger was the first one doing video calls 20 years ago. I remember that, 56k dial-up modem, msn messenger and talking to randos on the other side of the planet.
TiredOfLife · 3h ago
After Microsoft bought Skype they essentially rebuilt it on top of MSN messenger corpse
JSR_FDED · 4h ago
I liked the Skype Out function allowing you to call any phone from the Skype app using whatever WiFi or data you could find while traveling.

If anyone’s looking for the same functionality without anything complicated I did some research and ended up with the Viber app. It’s a social network which you don’t have to use at all, and provides the same function as Skype Out to call regular phones.

cromulent · 4h ago
After Viber was pinged for delivering Pegasus spyware, I switched to RebTel. Works fine.

https://cyberinsider.com/viber-messenger-abused-for-deliveri...

zatertip · 4h ago
That wasn't a zero-click infection attempt. You had to actually click on the link to get infected. This could happen on any service that allows you to send links.
bluenose69 · 5h ago
I haven't given Skype a thought in years. I wish I could say the same for Teams, that thing that administrators seem to love and users seem to hate.
Propelloni · 5h ago
I guess the reason you see MS Teams everywhere is because it is bundled for free with all those MS365 packages that are bought for Excel anyway. And for free it certainly is good enough. Group policies and integration into the MS365 admin backend is just icing on the cake.
c0n5pir4cy · 4h ago
Good enough is the problem. We've got Windows, Mac, Android, IOS and Linux clients and the only platform it seems to work on over 95% of the time is Windows; but unfortunately it's free and 95% of the users are on Windows so it's what we use.

I think the EU were right with their antitrust case.

guiriduro · 5h ago
Had a clean reliable digital to PSTN service, DID (Skype number) setup and reasonable pricing, now gone. Windows screenshare made it better than Facetime for that usecase also. To think that the buggy Teams monstrosity/failing Slack wannabe is their take on "evolving" p2p chat, but I guess worse is better.
tim333 · 3h ago
Skype out was useful.

I had an account with auto top up from my card for years. I assumed they'd refund the unused credit when they closed but it seems they have decided to keep it which I feel is unsporting. About 15 euro so it won't break the bank but there should still be a general principle not to steal your clients funds.

flynumber · 5h ago
Microsoft really dropped the ball with Skype during Covid..

At FlyNumber we saw the decline early, we used to be able to point DID phone numbers directly to Skype accounts - it was great, of course Microsoft killed that around the time of their acquisition ... but why? All it did was force end-users to using SIP clients.

benfortuna · 3h ago
They went all-in on Teams just before the start of COVID, and MS don't typically support multiple overlapping products like Google do (although the number of task management products may be a counter-argument to that).
loloquwowndueo · 3h ago
What are people replacing Skype with, for calls to international phones (cell, landline)?

That’s the only thing we used it for (calling relatives who for reasons, are unable to get an iPad and use FaceTime like normal people). We’ve been struggling to find a reasonable replacement that doesn’t look sketchy. It also doesn’t need to be free, we used a Skype subscription so we are ok to pay a reasonable fee.

Viber and Rebtel have come up in my searches but I would love more opinions/options.

Larrikin · 3h ago
This seems like a very niche use case in 2025 as all the other options over the internet are flat rate and significantly cheaper.

The couple times in the past 10 years I have had to to interact with an international business over an actual phone number, I used Google Voice.

loloquwowndueo · 3h ago
Yes, some people like me still need to do it this way. That’s the literal definition of niche :)

(Google voice is not available where I live)

andyjohnson0 · 4h ago
"Teams (free)" seems like poor branding for a person-to-person personal communications product. I suspect that most such users moved to Whatsapp long ago, although I'm not sure of the situation in North America.
OliveMate · 2h ago
I'll always be amazed at how Skype went from being top dog in 2010 to not even being considered a choice in 2020. How did Microsoft drop the ball so hard that when the Pandemic rolled around everyone decided to use the then-unheard of Zoom instead?

Taking a general public lens here. For vidya, Teamspeak/Mumble provided better quality & latency but Skype remained king for its ease of ad-hoc calls until Discord blew it out of the water.

another_kel · 2h ago
Skype was built on p2p for 2000s internet. It was great technology at the time, but completely wrong choice for 2010s with smartphones and huge chat groups.

If we went back in time the only way to truly save skype would be to basically make discord and gradually replace skype with it, keeping the userbase. This would be way harder than just making discord because migration is harder that writing from scratch and getting that migration approved in a corporate setting is insanely hard.

donohoe · 4h ago
The org I work at marked the final days with a send-off that really tried to capture the spirit of what it meant to so many of us. The nostalgia, the weird emoticons, the dial tone - all of it. I'm not going to miss Skype, but I will miss the idea of it.

https://restofworld.org/2025/skype-shutting-down/

lxgr · 2h ago
What a sad ending for both a once amazing pioneer of P2P technology and a great brand and product. Thanks for nothing, Microsoft.
Aardwolf · 3h ago
I sometimes use Skype in a web browser on Linux. Will this migration to Teams work in that as well?

The instructions in the article say "Download Teams on your device" so that makes it sound like no...

bni · 2h ago
Thankfully you can use teams in a web browser. I use it in Safari and will never install anything.

It still sucks though, but it's just another website that suck.

ndsipa_pomu · 40m ago
Strangely, using Teams in a browser (Firefox in my case) works far better than trying to install Teams on Linux (Ubuntu in my case). The last time I tried to install Teams, it would just show a blank rectangle and refuse to do anything else.
billpg · 4h ago
Who do y'all use for a dialable USA phone number these days? (I'm in England.)

I have (had) a +1-423 Skype number to receive calls (twice a month or so) that took messages that I could play in the Skype web-app.

lxgr · 2h ago
Google Voice is amazing, but requires a US phone number to set up.
billpg · 2h ago
I wonder if an American friend could set it up for me. My gmail mailbox but their US phone number. (Thanks for the recommendation!)
lxgr · 51m ago
It should, but they've recently been somewhat picky about which phone numbers they accept for the initial setup.

Once you get it, you don't need access to that US number afterwards – very useful when traveling; everything just works via VoIP, including texting, which is a lifesaver for 2FA when traveling without US roaming.

Of course, it's a Google service, so expect it to be discontinued without warning at the exact moment you've totally integrated it into your daily life.

aborsy · 4h ago
Teams doesn’t have Skype calling, except in its expensive business plans and with a Phone Plan add-on.

Skype had quality issues, but at least it was easy to charge it and call. It’s got worse now with teams.

philipwhiuk · 4h ago
It's honestly amazing Skype lasted as long as it did at Microsoft.
relistan · 5h ago
Seems hard to believe that no one would have bought this brand at least.
richrichardsson · 4h ago
Perhaps instead of that they're shutting it down for creative accounting purposes?
relistan · 1h ago
:shrug: who knows
cranberryturkey · 6h ago
I interviewed at skype after paypal acquired them and then spun them off again. It was a cool p2p app, then microsoft took it over and made it centralized.
PicassoCTs · 5h ago
Its funny in a way, all that money, but because the paradigm of the organization has to be enforced into the tech, those fingers can not hold this chalice.
cranberryturkey · 2h ago
when i interviewed there, the VP of Engineer told me skype used to be a bittorrent client, but then they pivoted, hired a ton of video compression engineers and create Skype. video calling using the same p2p technology as bittorrent
AStonesThrow · 6h ago
> It was a cool p2p app

Indeed, I shall certainly miss the low-grade flood of spammers and scammers who slid into my DMs over the decades I wasn't using my Skype profile for anything at all.

dewey · 5h ago
Definitely a Skype problem, spamming definitely wouldn't happen on any other service.
cranberryturkey · 5h ago
you're joking right?
dewey · 5h ago
Maybe!
ChrisArchitect · 2h ago
More discussion then:

Microsoft is killing Skype

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43202052

moralestapia · 3h ago
RIP my 50 Euros that they didn't want to re-imburse.

"Just use Teams, your money will be there" ... hmmm, no thanks.

Bender · 1h ago
$120 here. I think they are trying to encourage people to utilize license key generators and related work-arounds for their products.
tim333 · 3h ago
I clicked "just use teams" but no sign of my money that I can see.
qsort · 5h ago
F

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