Skype Is Officially Dead. And Yeah, It Feels Personal
Before WhatsApp. Before Zoom. Before FaceTime—there was Skype.
Skype is officially gone. After 21 years of late-night video calls, choppy audio, and that unmistakable bloop ringtone, Microsoft shut it down on May 5. The announcement came back in February, giving users just 10 weeks to save, download, or migrate their account info before that familiar blue icon vanished for good.
It’s the kind of quiet ending that feels unfair for an app that once defined how we stayed connected. And if that news makes you feel oddly sentimental, you’re not alone.
Loy Okezie
Before WhatsApp. Before Zoom. Before FaceTime, there was Skype.
Back in 2003, making a call to another country was a luxury: timed, expensive, and often avoided altogether. Then along came Skype, a voice calling app built by a small team in Estonia, and suddenly talking to someone halfway across the world was as easy as clicking a button. Distance didn’t feel like such a wall anymore.
Then Skype added video. And that changed everything.
People caught on fast. By the late 2000s, Skype was everywhere—and it was so common, its name became a verb. “Let’s Skype later” meant “Let’s talk face to face,” even if you ended up using something else. People Skyped their parents. Their partners. Their friends. It kept families close, relationships alive, and study-abroad students sane. Entire long-distance love stories were built over that blurry video feed. Some probably ended there, too.
If you were around during Skype’s heyday, you remember the sounds: the ringtone, the “pop” of a new message, the slightly-too-long pause while waiting for someone to say, “Can you hear me now?” It wasn’t perfect, but it made international connections feel easy. It made it feel human.
Then came Microsoft. In 2011, they bought Skype for $8.5 billion, planning to make it their flagship communication tool. But Skype, bless it, was built for another time—the desktop era. As the world shifted to mobile, newer apps like FaceTime, Zoom, and WhatsApp took over. Meanwhile, Microsoft began quietly favouring Teams. Skype became the overlooked child, slowly fading into the background.
Loy Okezie
At its peak, Skype had over 300 million monthly users. By 2023, that number had dropped to just 36 million. Most people didn’t even realise it was still around.
There were still pockets of loyal users—especially in places like Turkey, Russia, India, and the Philippines—but for most of us, Skype had already become part of internet history. A once-essential tool, now a relic.
Microsoft wants you to use Teams now. And sure, it works. But Teams is all business. Skype was personal. It helped us see faces we missed. It helped us hear voices from far away. It made the distance feel smaller.
So yeah, it’s just an app. But it mattered. And now it’s gone. Thanks for the calls, Skype. We’ll miss you.
