The next chapter: Moving from Skype to Microsoft Teams:
[...] In order to streamline our free consumer communications offerings so we can more easily adapt to customer needs, we will be retiring Skype in May 2025 to focus on Microsoft Teams (free), our modern communications and collaboration hub.
With Teams, users have access to many of the same core features they use in Skype, such as one-on-one calls and group calls, messaging, and file sharing. Additionally, Teams offers enhanced features like hosting meetings, managing calendars, and building and joining communities for free.
[...] During this transition period, users have a choice:
1. Move to Microsoft Teams for free. Over the coming days, we will roll out the ability for Skype users to sign into Teams (free) on any supported device using their Skype credentials—starting today with those who are part of both the Teams and Skype Insider programs. By logging in to Teams with a Skype account, chats and contacts will automatically appear in the app so you can quickly pick up where you left off.
During the transition period, Teams users can call and chat with Skype users and Skype users can do the same with Teams users. This helps ensure you can stay connected with everyone, regardless of the platform you're using during this transition.
2. Export your Skype data. If you prefer not to migrate to Teams, you can instead export your data including chats, contacts, and call history.
Skype will remain available until May 5, 2025, giving users time to explore Teams and decide on the option that works best for them.
Related Stories
Skype Shuts Down Today [May 5], Marking The End Of An Internet Era
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
When I first heard Skype was shutting down, I had one reaction: “Wait…people are still using it?” But jokes apart, hearing that the platform I once used for prank calls and late-night chats is officially retiring hit me with a surprising wave of nostalgia. If you’re a 90s kid like me, you’re probably feeling it too. Yes, today, May 5, 2025, is the day Skype takes its last breath.
Microsoft is moving Skype users over to Teams Free, which will serve as Skype’s successor. The good news is you won’t have to start from scratch. You can log into Microsoft Teams Free with your existing Skype credentials. Your Skype contacts and chat history will also automatically transfer to Teams. If you were still using Skype, you may have already seen an in-app notification prompting you to migrate your data before it’s too late.
[...] So here’s to you, Skype. Thanks for the memories, the dial tones, the pixelated video chats, and the surreal experience of calling a phone from a desktop PC with a dial-up connection. Even as you fade into the Microsoft Teams ecosystem, a little piece of internet history is dying off with you.
Skype is Officially Dead Today and This is Why People Should Use Free Software Instead
Today, or this morning in the US (this was one hour ago), some of the technical media will offer a timely and much-needed reminder; some will tell you to move to another Microsoft thing (checking the Web, some of the sites spew out promotional spam or chaff for Microsoft today; those sites are connected to Microsoft! "Microsoft mourners" psydroid calls them, "can't get more pathetic than this") and some will tell you to move to some other proprietary thing, i.e. move from one spyware to other spyware from another company, usually from the same country, i.e. the same masters. Few will have the guts/courage/"balls" to mention truly secure software because there's no "money" in selling confidentiality; sponsors, except phonies (false marketing), won't pay to seed such promotional (sponsored) articles. "Skype to go offline on May 5; Microsoft urges transition to Teams", said an LLM slop hub, failing to mention good and ethical alternatives. Maybe it does not quite "rhyme" in Microsoft-controlled LLMs.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 04, @02:19AM (1 child)
Just leave the mothership.
Convince your company to do the same.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by KritonK on Tuesday March 04, @07:02AM
In our case it is the company, which has convinced the staff to leave more than one mothership! We installed nextcloud [nextcloud.com], which is open source, and have moved away from using dropbox, zoom, and skype in one fell swoop. Two months later, we are still in the process of fine-tuning the beast, but despite the steep learning curve as far as installation and administration goes, management has committed the company to using it, and we won't be turning back.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by dwilson98052 on Tuesday March 04, @02:22AM (1 child)
...fuck that... not happening.
I'm tired of MS nerfing everything and generally making computing worse ever since the blew their load on creating nothing but chrome apps.
Sure, you can build good chrome apps.... but MS can't, so fuck em.
I'll take my toys and go somewhere else to play.
(Score: 4, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 04, @02:39AM
You've stuck with Skype this long? That's impressive inertia, it's been firmly in M$' grasp for over a decade.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 04, @02:46AM (6 children)
Been forced to use Teams by a couple of customers for our engineering services. So far I've refused to download the software to my laptop, instead use the browser version in Firefox, which has a few quirks:
If I zoom the main window to make things readable (crtl+scroll-wheel) in one open tab, that zoom level is applied to all the other MS-Teams & Sharepoint/OneNote tabs...some of which need to be zoomed the other way to make _them_ readable. I'm getting good at zooming in and out(which feels ridiculous).
After a few weeks of light chatting in Teams, scrolling up to see some old post takes forever (that may be a function of the company cloud that hosts this instance of Teams?) After heavy use for a few months, scrolling up more than a few pages is pretty much a losing battle.
All open chats are displayed in the left nav bar, which would be fine if I only had one customer. As it is, there's no way I've found to open a new instance, so I have to be really careful to not mix up chats between the different customers.
(Score: 2) by Barenflimski on Tuesday March 04, @03:46AM (3 children)
The entire thing is annoying and frustrating.
Not a fan, but because it kinda works and is included with Microsoft products, its ubiquitous.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Unixnut on Tuesday March 04, @05:30PM (2 children)
Pretty much this. Not only that but by bundling it with other MS products it gave companies the excuse to switch to Teams. Happened at a previous company of mine. We were happy with Slack and Zoom, but when Teams got bundled in the C-Suite was like "Why are we paying for Slack and Zoom when we got Teams for free and does the same thing".
Despite the howls of protest from everyone technical we were all forced onto Teams, and people have hated using it ever since (it actually spurred a move back to phone calling and meeting in person, rather than use Teams).
Even my current place is full on use of Teams. Nobody likes it, but its used because "it came bundled with the licence, so why pay extra for other tools that do the same thing". At this point I never met anyone who uses Teams because its good, let alone better than the competition. Mostly it is used because its already there and doesn't cost extra to use.
Quite frankly I am surprised MS didn't get in trouble for bundling Teams, seeing they got into trouble years ago for bundling IE (and despite the growth of the web and smartphones, Microsoft is still the dominant software provider used in business)
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday March 04, @11:03PM (1 child)
Everything MS, across the board, seems to be the K-mart of its marketplace.
People who want the most fashionable and stylish stuff regardless of expense buy Apple. If you want to actually get stuff done, they sign up with Google. There's the hipster boutique shoppers for 3rd parties. The DIYers set up Linux stuff and host their own. Finally everything MS is hated by its own users but its cheaper so they're "stuck" with it, and everything is kind of half ass and brittle and doesn't work that well but it kind of limps on.
The only possible exception I can think of is Azure, which is actually pretty good stuff but insanely overpriced, its the "Apple" of cloud. "Hi I'd like something like AWS except that it integrates deeply and perfectly with the rest of the MS ecosystem and I don't mind if it costs 10x as much". Some of the SaaS is even more, price out a MSSQL instance for fun experimentation sometime (its about a car payment per month, last time I checked).
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Wednesday March 05, @10:14PM
That is the "Hook them young, then milk them later" business practice. When you are a small start up MS will offer you their entire suite of software (desktop, server, AD, the whole lot) as a site licence for very little money. Unless you are explicitly interested in Unix technology as a company then MS deal is usually the best offer you will get to start your business up.
It works very well, you get MS Server, AD, Outlook, Windows Desktops, MSSQL and other dev tools, all together, and you can concentrate on growing your business.
However this makes you dependent on their ecosystem, and if your company grows and becomes successful over a decade or more, eventually the size will reach a point where the above offer no longer qualifies. Then MS will really hit you with licencing costs. MS stuff suddenly costs 10x the competition, but you (and MS) know that it would cost you 50x that to re-write all your legacy stuff to move off the MS ecosystem, so you pay the 10x going rate.
It happened at a previous start-up I worked for. MS offered their ecosystem on really good rates when they were starting out, but 15 years later the licencing costs hit, and we paid them because it would have taken years and magnitudes more money to re-write 15 years of everything being dependent on MS tooling.
We used and paid for Azure because of Azure AD, which tied in to MS AD, which tied into the e-mail, the desktops, the SSO, everything. Ripping all that out would have halted the business and cost huge amounts of money, for a result that to the end users works exactly the same as before.
It is a captive audience, and MS has been doing this for decades, it is their "cash cow" income stream that has been a good earner for them every since.
(Score: 2) by corey on Wednesday March 05, @01:49AM (1 child)
I’m the same. Forced to use it for work. Used to have the client installed (silly me), removed it and now only access it from a Firefox tab. My experience is that video calls are unworkable in Firefox. It’s like I have a bandwidth constraint of 500kbps. Works a few seconds then cuts with that bozo sound and a reconnecting message. Then starts again. Repeat. I guess it’s to do with ublock/container tabs/cookie Autodelete/etc. So I installed Brave browser and with all the tracking and ad protection on, video calls work fine. I figure Microsoft are borking Firefox but it isn’t systematic. I tried setting my browser id to chrome but that didn’t help. This is on Windows but I can’t remember if I have the same problem in Linux (which I use when I’m not required to use windows specific software).
All in all, I despise any Microsoft software because in all my years experience, it’s always the most dysfunctional, bloated, corrupted with spyware experience. Skype was great in the day, would’ve last used it just before Microsoft bought it. Called home with it while backpacking around Europe a lot in ‘06-07.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 06, @01:36AM
> My experience is that video calls are unworkable in Firefox.
GP here, I would have added that to my list of quirks if I'd known. The people I use Teams with never turn on their cameras. We've mostly met in real life, don't need to see each other, and just focus on the engineering challenges at hand.
Which reminds me, their IT dept has Teams set to require a fresh login every 24 hours--time to fight that daily battle. Sometimes logins fail and take extra fooling around (like searching in browser history for a page with the right login screen), so I've recently got in the habit of logging in during the evening. That way Teams is (usually) ready to go when the work day starts tomorrow (USA, EST).
If this customer wasn't great in nearly every other way, the forced use of Teams could be enough to have me looking for someone else to work for.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Barenflimski on Tuesday March 04, @03:43AM (2 children)
I hope I'm still alive when Teams is retired.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 04, @04:07AM
Will happen when Azure falls.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Dr Spin on Tuesday March 04, @07:15AM
I will rejoice when Microsoft retires all of its teams.
I especially hope for the top executives being retired.
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 5, Informative) by shrewdsheep on Tuesday March 04, @08:32AM
I'm still on skype for one killer feature: being able to call phone numbers. I'm on a prepaid mobile contract and it costs me a fortune to call out-of-country numbers. Skype saved me last year when I was stranded on an airport and had to make a call that would have depleted my prepaid credit in a matter of minutes. Out of curiosity, I will probably check what happens to my remaining skype credit but expect it to be lost.
(Score: 4, Informative) by stormreaver on Tuesday March 04, @12:43PM (2 children)
Perhaps Jitsi (https://jitsi.org/) will serve some Skype refugees.
(Score: 2) by stormreaver on Wednesday March 05, @01:04AM (1 child)
What moron modded this down as Off Topic? It is exactly on topic.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday March 05, @01:31AM
The same person possibly that is complaining that they have been mis-moderated elsewhere. One of our community appears to do this most times that they appear. They are just being petty.
It has been corrected by the community.
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 2) by kolie on Tuesday March 04, @07:04PM (4 children)
w(ho)tf is using skype and not teams already.
(Score: 2) by kolie on Tuesday March 04, @07:05PM (3 children)
also idk why people are hating on teams. for corporate chat / messaging / sharing stuff, collaboration, it isn't shit, atleast, I can do my job, use it extensively, and it doesn't get in my way and actually does a few things pretty nicely.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Tuesday March 04, @07:55PM (2 children)
Well, that might be the problem. It is fine for 'corporate stuff.....'. It is what MS want to sell. But that is not what I want to buy.
I want a telephone not a business software package. Skype was usable by anybody, I could travel and keep in touch with home. What would I want all the other crap for?
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 2) by kolie on Tuesday March 04, @09:12PM (1 child)
Which isn't what teams claims to be. It's not so much hating teams as not using teams for the purposes of skype. That's what I am getting at - not saying it's a skype replacement.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Wednesday March 05, @02:48AM
You might not be saying it, but that is exactly what MS is saying.
200 million years is actually quite a long time.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday March 04, @10:52PM
https://teams.github.com/ [github.com]
Kind of surprised nobody's mentioning this. I can't immediately think of a replacement for this using skype.
I'm not saying it is better or a good idea or not that bad, I'm just saying that I think this is their big picture long term move. You can just get the tendrils dug in deeper with teams integrations than with other apps.
Teams Essentials is $4/month/user/year or its part of 365 business basic "for free" and IIRC is included in everything more expensive than 365 business basic. I could see them trying something in the future like Github becoming "part of teams" in the future for $4/month or becoming "part of business basic" for $6/month.