Non-biz Skype Kicks The Bucket On May 5

If you hadn't already noticed when Skype Credit sales were first suspended in December 5, 2024, the once ubiquitous IP telephony and vid calling wunderkind is no more – at least as a paid service for consumers.

Code was first spotted by XDA this morning as a message inside of the latest Skype for Windows preview reading "Starting in May, Skype will no longer be available. Continue your calls and chats in Teams."

The tech giant 'fessed up shortly after that the service will be no more from May this year, although this does not impact Skype for Business.

Weeks after sunsetting Skype to Phone services and nearly three months after ending its JV with Korea's Daesung group, Skype Daesung, Microsoft has at last called time on the once popular service. (We should have guessed it when it went ad-free.)

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The answer? Teams, or that's at least what Microsoft would like. The productivity platform was added to Office 365 in 2017 for free and became popular during the pandemic, along with Zoom, partly due to its video conferencing. Others who used Skype for its debit/ credit-based calls to landline and mobile telephones – so you could call your dad on the landline while backpacking in Thailand – have already mostly moved to WhatsApp and other free OTT apps. But some users on the support platforms still haven't got the memo.

Skype – the brainchild of Kazaa co-founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis – was launched in beta in late 2003, bought by eBay in 2005 and then by Microsoft for $8.5 billion in 2011.

Skype users will have the option to move to Microsoft Teams Free, "which offers many of the same core features and more," and, or so the Windows-maker hopes, will also host their contacts. Those who prefer not to? You can export, download (via a .tar file), or delete your Skype data here. You still have around 65 days to decide. ®