Microsoft, Skype's owner, says it is refocusing on further developing its chat and video conferencing product Teams, and Skype users' contacts will be automatically transferred to that platform.

Skype was a pioneer in VoIP tech and helped put Estonia on the map as a startup and tech hub soon after it was founded. It went live in August 2003.

In recent years, however, as the focus shifted from phone calls to messaging and video conferencing apps, Skype started losing market share to newer competitors, including Zoom, Slack, Signal and Google Meet.

When Microsoft bought Skype in 2011, it had around 150 million monthly users, but by 2020 that number had dropped to about 23 million.

Teams currently has around 320 million active monthly users, Microsoft says.

Microsoft decided at the start of this year to direct all resources toward a single "future-proof" platform, and says that Skype users will be able to log into Teams using their Skype credentials.

Skype was originally created by four Estonian programmers: Priit Kasesalu, Jaan Tallinn, Ahti Heinla, and Toivo Annus, and headquartered in the Mustamäe district of Tallinn. The company was first acquired by e-commerce company eBay. Microsoft later paid around US$8.5 billion to acquire the company.

One of its main early attractions in pre-smartphone and messenger app days was allowing users to make calls, for free to other Skype users, and paid to regular phone numbers.

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