Skype

~ the obit ~

Skype came out in August 2003. Two guys made it, the same ones who had made Kazaa a couple of years before. The whole point was simple. You could talk to anyone in the world for free, over the internet, as long as both of you had Skype. At the time this felt like a small miracle. International phone calls cost real money. Long distance was something you planned. Skype just made it free.

eBay bought it in 2005 for 2.6 billion dollars. Nobody really understood why eBay wanted it. Then Microsoft bought it from eBay in 2011 for 8.5 billion dollars. That was the most Microsoft had ever paid for anything up to that point. Around 2016, about 300 million people were using Skype every month. After that the numbers only went down.

Microsoft turned off the consumer version of Skype on May 5, 2025. By then most people had already stopped using it. The shutdown was less of a funeral and more of a confirmation.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rituals ~

The sunday call. Your mum or your grandma would set it up. There was always twenty minutes of "can you see me, i can't see you, the camera is upside down, why is it green, hold on, my husband is plugging it in" before any actual conversation could happen. The conversation itself was usually fine. The setup was the real ritual.

The status. You had options. Online, Away, Busy, Do Not Disturb, Invisible. Most people lived on Invisible. The whole point of being invisible was that you could see who else was online without them seeing you. The problem was everyone else was also invisible. So most of the time the contact list looked empty when in fact everyone was there.

The ringtone. Six little boops in a row. If you worked in any office in 2010, this sound went off about twice an hour somewhere on your floor. People who worked in tech in that era remember it the way older people remember the dial up handshake. It was just always there.

The contact list. Mostly family. A few people from a job you had ten years ago. One ex you never deleted. Maybe a long lost cousin. Some of those names belonged to people who had passed away by the late 2010s. Their accounts still showed up in your contact list, sometimes with a green dot, because Skype could not always tell the difference between a person and a logged in computer.

The bad video. Even in 2018, Skype video looked worse than FaceTime had looked in 2010. The compression was strange. The colors were washed out. Everyone looked tired. Faces would freeze with one eye open or one side of a smile. The audio would go out of sync with the video. You would hear someone laugh ten seconds after they laughed. Nobody complained about this very loudly because everyone had got used to it.

The screenshare. Used mostly by parents and uncles to show you a problem with their computer. "Can you see my screen now? Yes? OK, what is this thing here, the one that won't go away." Always a popup. Always a toolbar that someone had installed by accident in 2009.

~ cause of death ~

Skype died in slow motion. The first thing that broke it was the smartphone. Once everyone had WhatsApp and FaceTime in their pocket, the original pitch (free calls anywhere) was no longer special. You could just pick up your phone and call anyone for free. Skype required you to sit down at a computer.

The second thing was Zoom. When the pandemic hit in 2020, Zoom became the default for video calls almost overnight. Skype could have been that. It already had hundreds of millions of accounts and twenty years of brand recognition. But the product had been on autopilot for years. The interface was confusing. People had a Skype account but had not opened it in months. So when they needed a video call for work, they downloaded Zoom instead.

The third thing was Microsoft itself. Microsoft kept moving its enterprise users to Teams and let Skype just sit there. Updates got smaller. The mobile app got worse, then got rewritten, then got worse again. By 2023, Microsoft was clearly not interested in Skype anymore. The shutdown announcement in February 2025 was almost a relief.

What killed Skype in the end was that it was made for a desktop computer. You sat down, you started a call, you stayed in one place for an hour. Everything that came after Skype assumed you were on a phone, walking around, or just sending a quick voice note. Skype kept trying to be a phone app. It was never very good at it.

~ aftermath ~

Free international calls used to be a feature. Skype made them free, and then everything else made them free, and now nobody thinks about it. The whole category of "ways to call a human in another country" disappeared into the regular phone.

The family video call as a weekly event. For about a decade, sunday at 7pm meant skype with the grandparents. The platform changed but the pattern stuck. Your kids will video call their grandparents on something else, but the shape of the call (slightly shouty, twenty minutes of audio problems, ten minutes of actual content) is going to be the same.

The skype call as a 2010s movie. If a film made between 2008 and 2016 had a long distance relationship in it, Skype was the relationship. The bad video was almost a feature. It made the longing feel more honest.

~ what people said ~

"my dad in turkey called me on skype every sunday for fourteen years. when microsoft announced the shutdown i opened skype for the first time in two years just to see if his account was still there. it was. green dot. i did not call. i don't know why." e.k. 35

"i interviewed for my first job on skype in 2014. the camera was tilted up at my ceiling. you could see one nostril for the whole interview. i got the job anyway. i still work there." m.t. 32

"my long distance was a russian girl in 2009. we talked on skype for three hours every night for almost two years. i moved to st petersburg. we got married. we are still married. we use whatsapp now." j.l. 40

"my grandfather did not understand that we could see him. for the first six months he just listened. he said it was the radio." s.b. 29