“The end of an era": Microsoft to end support for Skype platform in May 2025
Kyiv • UNN
Microsoft will stop supporting Skype in May 2025, replacing it with Teams. The company has already begun warning Windows users about the upcoming platform shutdown and suggests switching to Teams.
In May 2025, Microsoft will end support for Skype, which is the final step in the transition to Teams.
This was reported by the technology portal XDA Developers, UNN writes.
Details
As reported by XDA Developers, a message has appeared in the latest preview version of Skype for Windows warning users that:
Starting in May, Skype will no longer be available. Keep calling and chatting in Teams
This is followed by a note that a certain number of “your friends have already switched to Teams for free”, probably based on your contacts. Skype was first launched in 2003 and acquired by Microsoft in 2011.
A few years later, the company stopped supporting some of its internal communication products, such as Windows Live Messenger, and then in 2015, the company tried to integrate Skype into Windows 10.
Integration with Windows 10 took about nine months. The company added separate apps for video calling, messaging, and phone calls and removed them in the next update.
When this update came out in 2016, it introduced the UWP app, continuing to move away from Win32, only to kill UWP and return to Win32.
The move to replace Skype with Teams took place in 2017, when Microsoft launched Teams as a collaboration platform, aiming to compete with other services such as Slack.
Despite its popularity in the early years, Skype failed to take a dominant position in the communication services market due to competition from Apple's FaceTime and Microsoft's numerous failures in the mobile market. And with the launch of Windows 11, Microsoft integrated Teams, providing a free personal version of this service.
Microsoft itself has not yet made any statements about the closure of the Skype platform.
