It’s hard to look at that familiar sky-blue logo without hearing the signature Skype ringtone echo in your mind. For years, Skype was the go-to app for international calls, long-distance relationships, awkward job interviews, and family catch-ups with relatives overseas.

You’d rush home from school, hop on your computer, maybe even connect to the internet the old-fashioned way by hooking your device to an ethernet cable, meaning no one else could use the landline while you were online, and call your friends on Skype. It was every kid’s canon event. With over half a billion users, Skype eventually caught the eye of Microsoft, who purchased the app for $8.5 billion.

But that’s when disaster struck. Microsoft began releasing updates that made Skype worse. Ads and bloatware bogged down the user experience. Then, in 2015, Discord launched, which targeted the gaming market and quickly stole a significant chunk of Skype’s user base.

In response, Microsoft pivoted to a business-first approach for Skype. But that strategy crumbled too when Covid-19 came and Zoom entered the scene in earnest. This could have been Skype’s big moment. The world was at a standstill, people were looking left and right for a way to stay connected, and there were tons of new apps in the market.

But Skype, despite having had a legacy of its own and all the benefits of being a first-mover, was unable to compete. Zoom offered a far more convenient solution. And it was web-based as well. One of Skype’s drawbacks was its app, which got worse with updates.

It’s interesting to look back at 2017 when Skype rolled out its redesign, because that’s when the downfall became apparent. Android users got a month’s head start before the refreshed app landed on iPhones. Instead of fixing Skype’s unreliable notifications and syncing, Microsoft added new, less important features like emojis for video calls and a Snapchat-like ‘Highlight’ option.

However, that new look didn’t sit well with Apple users. Almost immediately after its release on the App Store, Skype’s ratings took a nosedive globally. In the UK, the app’s rating plummeted to a mere one star. Similarly, in the US, the ratings dropped significantly from a respectable 3.5 stars to just 1.5 stars. Clearly, the redesign didn’t resonate with a significant portion of Skype’s user base on iOS.

The business space was taken over by Microsoft Teams, which once again showcases just how redundant and arguably ego-driven the purchase of Skype was. It’s not all bleak, though. Microsoft salvaged the tech. Much of Skype’s voice infrastructure now powers Microsoft Teams, which has taken over the business communication space. So, in a sense, Skype didn’t die; it was absorbed.

But for consumers? There just wasn’t enough investment or innovation to keep it relevant.

So the inevitable happened. The president of collaborative apps and platforms at Microsoft revealed in a Feb. 28 blog post that the company would be retiring the service in order to “streamline our free consumer communications offerings so we can more easily adapt to customer needs.”

If you’re one of the millions of people who spent their childhood on Skype, you have until January 2026 to download your data for the sake of nostalgia before permanent deletion.

What was Skype now lives under the hood of Teams. It slowly faded out into the background of tech history. Despite that, it did come with its own benefits, and they will be missed.

Unfortunately, Microsoft Teams (free) comes with a few downgrades compared to regular Skype. Group video calls are limited to 60 minutes and you also can’t use Teams for pay-as-you-go calling and SMS like you could with Skype Credit.

In all honesty, we can’t say we didn’t see it coming. Hardly anyone used Skype, and with WhatsApp having released its desktop version in March 2021 and Discord increasing in popularity from beyond its initial demographic of hard-core gamers, why would anyone?

Eman Ali is a business graduate from NUST and a part-time writer.