5 ms·
RIP Skype
- cranberryturkey 1y agoI interviewed at skype after paypal acquired them and then spun them off again. It was a cool p2p app, then microsoft took it over and made it centralized.
- AStonesThrow 1y ago> It was a cool p2p app Indeed, I shall certainly miss the low-grade flood of spammers and scammers who slid into my DMs over the decades I wasn't using my Skype profile for anything at all.
- dewey 1y agoDefinitely a Skype problem, spamming definitely wouldn't happen on any other service.
- cranberryturkey 1y agoyou're joking right?
- dewey 1y agoMaybe!
- PicassoCTs 1y agoIts funny in a way, all that money, but because the paradigm of the organization has to be enforced into the tech, those fingers can not hold this chalice.
- cranberryturkey 1y agowhen i interviewed there, the VP of Engineer told me skype used to be a bittorrent client, but then they pivoted, hired a ton of video compression engineers and create Skype. video calling using the same p2p technology as bittorrent
- PicassoCTs 1y agoWell now that the reason for acquisition is gone (NSA wants centralized communication and europe wants protection from the US) - could the same engineers build and sell the same software under a new name - Epyks for example?
- internet_points 1y agoLet's hope Teams is next in line
- FunnyLookinHat 1y agoEveryone I know who uses Teams does not like it. Is that selection bias based on my personal network of technically savvy peers and professionals, or is it founded in a broader experience? More importantly, does Microsoft really believe this is a winning product? Are they that out of touch with their customer base?
- seb1204 1y agoI use teams, I don't get the hate but have also not use slack. Are there good videos about it?
- prepend 1y agoI’ve never met anyone who chose to use Teams. My organization forces me to use it. I don’t like it, but to its credit, it is better than “Skype for business.” It’s strange to me how companies take these huge messaging brands and then just burn them down (Skype, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Google’s chatbominations, even AIM). As a user, they don’t fizzle out due to user disinterest, it’s always the owner just sort of doing away with it for something new. Is there just not a financial model here? Cheap to run and lots of users but no money. Skype seemed to be profitable back when I would use it for international calling.
- johannes1234321 1y agoThe issue is that they have working tools which work in one period, but fail to adapt to change. AIM, Yahoo, MSN etc. were mostly plain text systems, built around presence and a single client. Then came mobile phones, with unreliable connections, with messengers which allowed integrating pictures etc. and easy sign up (iMessage by using apple ID, which every iPhone user has; Whatsapp by using phone number which directly linked the contacts), which worked without battery draining connection. Skype originally worked by making random clients "super nodes" which coordinated the network, without needing a big data center managing it all. Making phones super nodes wasn't an option so they had to change their protocol in big ways. So adapting was a cost and changed user experience, while newcomers grew. In case of Google there was the addition of missing strategic leadership, where each team built their own new messenger, but nobody maintained any old one.
- bluenose69 1y agoI haven't given Skype a thought in years. I wish I could say the same for Teams, that thing that administrators seem to love and users seem to hate.
- Propelloni 1y agoI guess the reason you see MS Teams everywhere is because it is bundled for free with all those MS365 packages that are bought for Excel anyway. And for free it certainly is good enough. Group policies and integration into the MS365 admin backend is just icing on the cake.
- c0n5pir4cy 1y agoGood enough is the problem. We've got Windows, Mac, Android, IOS and Linux clients and the only platform it seems to work on over 95% of the time is Windows; but unfortunately it's free and 95% of the users are on Windows so it's what we use. I think the EU were right with their antitrust case.
- relistan 1y agoSeems hard to believe that no one would have bought this brand at least.
- richrichardsson 1y agoPerhaps instead of that they're shutting it down for creative accounting purposes?
- relistan 1y ago:shrug: who knows
- qsort 1y agoF
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- flynumber 1y agoMicrosoft really dropped the ball with Skype during Covid.. At FlyNumber we saw the decline early, we used to be able to point DID phone numbers directly to Skype accounts - it was great, of course Microsoft killed that around the time of their acquisition ... but why? All it did was force end-users to using SIP clients.
- benfortuna 1y agoThey went all-in on Teams just before the start of COVID, and MS don't typically support multiple overlapping products like Google do (although the number of task management products may be a counter-argument to that).
- sillystu04 1y agoSkype could’ve become WhatsApp, Zoom, or Discord. In 2010 it was in the prime position to win any of those segments.
- gregoriol 1y agoIt was the "whatsapp" around 2010: everyone had an account on it, was using it's name as a word, ... and it was working really well at a time when it wasn't so common to use video chat, smartphones, ... The story only repeats again though, like MSN messenger almost a decode before. Which one will be next?
- seb1204 1y agoICQ not MSN Messenger I thought
- rad_gruchalski 1y agoMsn messenger was the first one doing video calls 20 years ago. I remember that, 56k dial-up modem, msn messenger and talking to randos on the other side of the planet.
- TiredOfLife 1y agoAfter Microsoft bought Skype they essentially rebuilt it on top of MSN messenger corpse
- colmmacc 1y agoEarly one morning in August 2007 I was asleep in my apartment in Leiden and I got a call from my boss Dirk-Willem van Gulik to tell me that 1) Skype was having a global outage, 2) we had to help anyway we could, 3) scope, budget, people, nothing would get in our way. At the time we were working on Joost, a crazy startup that was founded by Skype's Janus and Niklas. We built 3 networks, in 3 countries, in a matter of hours to host Skype super nodes. Apparently Skype had gotten into a retry storm due to a cascading failure because too many peer to peer super nodes had been taken offline at the same time. I think that Tuesday was Windows update day and maybe that was the straw that broke the camel's back. The small list of hard-coded super-super-nodes couldn't cope with the deluge. It took 3 days to get everything back and running, and for me it was the start of a fun collaboration with the team at Skype and eBay who were always nice. Skype had sold to eBay for 2.6B in 2005. I don't think much diligence was done, and it didn't work out as a great integration for eBay. Then Skype was spun out and sold to Private Equity in 2009. The internet tells me that 65% was sold for 1.9B but I think there was some kind of write-down involved too. And then Microsoft bought Skype for 8.5B in 2009. So you can have multi-day world-headline outages, be from and based in the EU, and still have 3 unicorn scale exits! There's a lesson in there about recoverable and resilient you can make a business with a great product and good leaders.
- aa-jv 1y agoSkype was an intelligence-gathering platform with very few equals. In the era that Skype was producing unicorn horns, surveillance capitalism was on a rocket ride. I doubt those same conditions would allow for multiple unicorn horns in the modern era. You can't build a Skype-like surveillance network now; that horse has left the barn.
- guiriduro 1y agoHad a clean reliable digital to PSTN service, DID (Skype number) setup and reasonable pricing, now gone. Windows screenshare made it better than Facetime for that usecase also. To think that the buggy Teams monstrosity/failing Slack wannabe is their take on "evolving" p2p chat, but I guess worse is better.
- philipwhiuk 1y agoIt's honestly amazing Skype lasted as long as it did at Microsoft.
- JSR_FDED 1y agoI liked the Skype Out function allowing you to call any phone from the Skype app using whatever WiFi or data you could find while traveling. If anyone’s looking for the same functionality without anything complicated I did some research and ended up with the Viber app. It’s a social network which you don’t have to use at all, and provides the same function as Skype Out to call regular phones.
- cromulent 1y agoAfter Viber was pinged for delivering Pegasus spyware, I switched to RebTel. Works fine. https://cyberinsider.com/viber-messenger-abused-for-delivering-pegasus-spyware-on-targets/ https://cyberinsider.com/viber-messenger-abused-for-deliveri...
- zatertip 1y agoThat wasn't a zero-click infection attempt. You had to actually click on the link to get infected. This could happen on any service that allows you to send links.
- andyjohnson0 1y ago"Teams (free)" seems like poor branding for a person-to-person personal communications product. I suspect that most such users moved to Whatsapp long ago, although I'm not sure of the situation in North America.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- billpg 1y agoWho do y'all use for a dialable USA phone number these days? (I'm in England.) I have (had) a +1-423 Skype number to receive calls (twice a month or so) that took messages that I could play in the Skype web-app.
- lxgr 1y agoGoogle Voice is amazing, but requires a US phone number to set up.
- billpg 1y agoI wonder if an American friend could set it up for me. My gmail mailbox but their US phone number. (Thanks for the recommendation!)
- lxgr 1y agoIt should, but they've recently been somewhat picky about which phone numbers they accept for the initial setup. Once you get it, you don't need access to that US number afterwards – very useful when traveling; everything just works via VoIP, including texting, which is a lifesaver for 2FA when traveling without US roaming. Of course, it's a Google service, so expect it to be discontinued without warning at the exact moment you've totally integrated it into your daily life.
- aborsy 1y agoTeams doesn’t have Skype calling, except in its expensive business plans and with a Phone Plan add-on. Skype had quality issues, but at least it was easy to charge it and call. It’s got worse now with teams.
- donohoe 1y agoThe org I work at marked the final days with a send-off that really tried to capture the spirit of what it meant to so many of us. The nostalgia, the weird emoticons, the dial tone - all of it. I'm not going to miss Skype, but I will miss the idea of it. https://restofworld.org/2025/skype-shutting-down/ https://restofworld.org/2025/skype-shutting-down/
- loloquwowndueo 1y agoWhat are people replacing Skype with, for calls to international phones (cell, landline)? That’s the only thing we used it for (calling relatives who for reasons, are unable to get an iPad and use FaceTime like normal people). We’ve been struggling to find a reasonable replacement that doesn’t look sketchy. It also doesn’t need to be free, we used a Skype subscription so we are ok to pay a reasonable fee. Viber and Rebtel have come up in my searches but I would love more opinions/options.
- Larrikin 1y agoThis seems like a very niche use case in 2025 as all the other options over the internet are flat rate and significantly cheaper. The couple times in the past 10 years I have had to to interact with an international business over an actual phone number, I used Google Voice.
- loloquwowndueo 1y agoYes, some people like me still need to do it this way. That’s the literal definition of niche :) (Google voice is not available where I live)
- berbec 1y agoMicrosoft has a product already: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/microsoft-teams-phone https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/microsoft-te...
- Aardwolf 1y agoI sometimes use Skype in a web browser on Linux. Will this migration to Teams work in that as well? The instructions in the article say "Download Teams on your device" so that makes it sound like no...
- bni 1y agoThankfully you can use teams in a web browser. I use it in Safari and will never install anything. It still sucks though, but it's just another website that suck.
- ndsipa_pomu 1y agoStrangely, using Teams in a browser (Firefox in my case) works far better than trying to install Teams on Linux (Ubuntu in my case). The last time I tried to install Teams, it would just show a blank rectangle and refuse to do anything else.
- moralestapia 1y agoRIP my 50 Euros that they didn't want to re-imburse. "Just use Teams, your money will be there" ... hmmm, no thanks.
- tim333 1y agoSkype out was useful. I had an account with auto top up from my card for years. I assumed they'd refund the unused credit when they closed but it seems they have decided to keep it which I feel is unsporting. About 15 euro so it won't break the bank but there should still be a general principle not to steal your clients funds.
- wltr 1y agoHey, it’s Microsoft, why would you expect otherwise?
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoMore discussion then: Microsoft is killing Skype https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43202052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43202052
- OliveMate 1y agoI'll always be amazed at how Skype went from being top dog in 2010 to not even being considered a choice in 2020. How did Microsoft drop the ball so hard that when the Pandemic rolled around everyone decided to use the then-unheard of Zoom instead? Taking a general public lens here. For vidya, Teamspeak/Mumble provided better quality & latency but Skype remained king for its ease of ad-hoc calls until Discord blew it out of the water.
- another_kel 1y agoSkype was built on p2p for 2000s internet. It was great technology at the time, but completely wrong choice for 2010s with smartphones and huge chat groups. If we went back in time the only way to truly save skype would be to basically make discord and gradually replace skype with it, keeping the userbase. This would be way harder than just making discord because migration is harder that writing from scratch and getting that migration approved in a corporate setting is insanely hard.
- lxgr 1y agoWhat a sad ending for both a once amazing pioneer of P2P technology and a great brand and product. Thanks for nothing, Microsoft.
- johnea 1y agoAcquire, Extend, Abandon... Yet another victim of M$