Washington DC/Culver City California (NPR) – Microsoft, which acquired Skype in 2011 for $8.5 billion, announced in a post on X on Friday that the iconic voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP) service would soon go dark. It encouraged Skype users to instead migrate to a free version of Microsoft Teams — a communication app that helps users work together in real time.
In the more than two decades since it was founded, Skype has been largely overtaken by a bevy of competitors, such as FaceTime, WhatsApp, Zoom and Slack.
In a separate blog post, Microsoft said the move to shutter Skype was meant “to streamline our free consumer communications offerings so we can more easily adapt to customer needs.”
