REDMOND, WA — Microsoft on Monday officially shut down Skype, ending the platform’s 22-year run as the videoconferencing tool your dad insisted on using to call you from a Holiday Inn business center until roughly 2019.
Surviving users — a demographic Microsoft internally refers to as ‘people who have not yet replaced their printer’ — have been redirected to Teams, the company’s flagship collaboration platform best known for displaying a small notification at 4:47 p.m. on a Friday that reads Karen has joined the call.
‘Skype was a pioneer,’ said Devra Holst, a senior analyst at the Forrester adjacent consultancy MeshPoint Advisory. ‘It taught a generation that video calls were possible, that they were free, and that one of the participants would always be a disembodied forehead. Its legacy is essentially every awkward thing about modern remote work, plus the ringtone.’
Microsoft acquired Skype for $8.5 billion in 2011, a sum the company has spent the subsequent fourteen years gently pretending it did not spend. Internal usage data, partially leaked last year, suggested that by 2024 the platform’s most active user base consisted of long-distance grandparents, a single regional manager at an industrial fastener distributor in Akron, and an estimated 11,000 Russian-language phishing accounts that had not been informed of the shutdown and likely will not be.
The migration to Teams has not been entirely smooth. Several users report being automatically enrolled in a 9 a.m. recurring meeting titled ‘Q3 Stakeholder Touchbase’ upon first login, despite not being employed by anyone. Others say Teams installed itself a second time, defensively, in case the first one was deleted.
‘I just wanted to call my sister in Manila,’ said retired postal worker Ron Vetri, 71, of Scranton. ‘Now there’s a thing called a ‘channel’ and I’m in eight of them. One is named ‘general.’ I don’t know what that means. My sister is not in any of them.’
Microsoft, in a statement, thanked Skype users for their loyalty and assured them that ‘the spirit of Skype lives on within Teams,’ a phrase the company declined to define when pressed. The statement was distributed via a press release that, due to a Teams integration error, also notified 14,000 employees that someone had reacted to it with a thumbs-up.
A virtual memorial for the platform is scheduled for later this week. Attendees are advised to join five minutes early, ensure their microphone is muted, and accept that approximately one third of them will spend the service whispering ‘I think you’re frozen’ into the void.