RIP Skype

[colmmacc]

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]

It's funny how eBay still did better stewardship of Skype than Microsoft.

[aa-jv]

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.

[ignoramous]

> 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]

Let's hope Teams is next in line

[FunnyLookinHat]

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?

[sillystu04]

Skype could’ve become WhatsApp, Zoom, or Discord. In 2010 it was in the prime position to win any of those segments.

[gregoriol]

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?

[JSR_FDED]

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]

After Viber was pinged for delivering Pegasus spyware, I switched to RebTel. Works fine.

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

[flynumber]

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]

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).

[bluenose69]

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]

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.

[guiriduro]

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.

[loloquwowndueo]

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]

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.

[berbec]

Microsoft has a product already: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/microsoft-te...

[tim333]

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.

[wltr]

Hey, it’s Microsoft, why would you expect otherwise?

[andyjohnson0]

"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.

[moralestapia]

RIP my 50 Euros that they didn't want to re-imburse.

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

[Bender]

$120 here. I think they are trying to encourage people to utilize license key generators and related work-arounds for their products.

[tim333]

I clicked "just use teams" but no sign of my money that I can see.

[cranberryturkey]

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]

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.

[AStonesThrow]

> 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.

[relistan]

Seems hard to believe that no one would have bought this brand at least.

[richrichardsson]

Perhaps instead of that they're shutting it down for creative accounting purposes?

[OliveMate]

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]

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]

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/

[billpg]

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]

Google Voice is amazing, but requires a US phone number to set up.

[Aardwolf]

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...

[ndsipa_pomu]

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.

[bni]

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.

[philipwhiuk]

It's honestly amazing Skype lasted as long as it did at Microsoft.

[aborsy]

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.

[ChrisArchitect]

More discussion then:

Microsoft is killing Skype

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

[lxgr]

What a sad ending for both a once amazing pioneer of P2P technology and a great brand and product. Thanks for nothing, Microsoft.

[johnea]

Acquire, Extend, Abandon...

Yet another victim of M$

[qsort]

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