Skype will finally be closed on Monday: NPR

Skype, the groundbreaking online video call service, the There have been offline for more than two decades after Monday.

Microsoft, which belongs to the Skype, announced in February that the service would be available by May 5, and asked the users to switch to the free version of Microsoft teams whose communication platform offers the opportunity to achieve video calls.

“Skype was an essential part of the design of modern communication and the support of countless meaningful moments, and we feel honored to be part of the trip,” said Jeff Teper, President of Microsoft from Collaborative apps and platforms, in a blog post at the beginning of this year.

Skype, which was founded in 2003 by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, began as a service that was on the phone on the Internet. Later, users could also call each other and send private messages – all free of charge. It was one of the first video conference apps and exploded more and more popular, whereby this was available at one point more than 300 million users, according to the Washington Post.

In 2005, Ebay Skype bought dollars for 2.6 billion dollars. Ebay then sold his controlling interest in a group of investors in 2009, which in turn sold the video call service to Microsoft.

But the Skype user base has decreased in recent years, since the app was confronted with a growing competition through alternatives of video calls and messaging such as zoom, WhatsApp and slack. The app rose from around 40 million users to 36 million in 2023 in early 2020.

According to Microsoft, Skype users can migrate all chats and contacts directly to teams.