In 2003 two people named Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis had a great idea. They would start a type of service where they would offer phone calls to people over the internet. Their idea grew bigger and got more popular within a few years. After many years of providing the service to people, the makers of the service would add a few new things to it that really helped their popularity grow. They added video calls and private messages that were completely free and they named the app Skype.
Skype was acquired by several companies. First in 2005, eBay purchased the app for 2.6 billion dollars. Then in 2009, eBay sold it to a few investors which lasted a little bit. Lastly, the investors sold it to Microsoft who owned Skype until now.
Skype was very helpful, to people and also to the developments of online calls and messages. “Skype has been an integral part of shaping modern communications and supporting countless meaningful moments, and we are honored to have been part of the journey,” Jeff Teper, Microsoft’s president of collaborative apps and platforms, said in a blog post earlier this year.” This shows that Skype also helped build ways of communication over the internet. At one point Skype was bigger than YouTube. The app helped people with lots of business related things like business calls or important messages. Skype turned into the most popular app for communication over the internet. Millions of people were using it and it was very common to have the app downloaded on your phone or computer. Lots of people used the app for communication while traveling because it was free.
There are a few reasons why Skype was forced to shut down but the main reason was because of the amount of users the app had. There has been a lot of competition between video calling and messaging apps for some time now. In 2020, Zoom had an instant rise in popularity. Zoom could be used for a lot of purposes. People used it for school classes, business calls, and other important meetings while in their homes. This caused Skype to lose millions of people which did not help them at all.
People that used Skype for business could have had some important messages on there, so what did they do with them? Skype lets everyone download their data to a different platform called Teams. “Those who do not want to use Microsoft Teams Free can export their Skype data. Those who do nothing will have their data deleted in January 2026, Microsoft’s website says.” This shows that if people don’t move their data, then it will be deleted. Important work messages would be deleted and might not be retrievable, so it is recommended that people who used Skype to export their data elsewhere.
