One year after Microsoft retired Skype, the app is still fading into Teams
One year ago today, Microsoft retired Skype, ending the consumer video-calling app’s standalone run and pushing users toward Microsoft Teams Free.
In Microsoft’s support notice, the company says:
“As of May 5th, 2025, Skype is retired.”
In the announcement that preceded the shutdown, Microsoft said, “we will be retiring Skype in May 2025 to focus on Microsoft Teams (free), our modern communications and collaboration hub.”
The transition was framed as a simplification move.
Microsoft said the change was meant to “streamline our free consumer communications offerings” and let the company focus on Teams Free, which it described as offering Skype’s core features plus meetings, calendars, and communities.
The software giant also said Skype users could sign in to Teams Free with Skype credentials and that chats and contacts would move over automatically during the transition.
The shutdown did not land as a hard cutoff for every part of the product on day one. Microsoft said Skype users could export their data, and that existing paid subscriptions and calling plans would continue for a time.
Skype for Business was excluded from the retirement notice, and Microsoft kept the Skype Dial Pad available to remaining paid users through the Skype web portal and Teams Free after the retirement date.
A year on, the bigger change is that Microsoft has shifted the remaining Skype afterlife into data migration and cleanup.
In a December 20, 2025 update to the support page, Microsoft extended the export window until June 2026 and said users should submit export requests before data deletion begins on April 1, 2026.
The company also said active Skype users who moved to Teams Free before December 1, 2025 can still see their Skype chat and call history inside Teams Free.
That leaves Skype in a familiar Microsoft pattern.
The brand is gone as a consumer product, but pieces of its identity, contacts, and message history are still moving through Microsoft’s newer communications stack.
For people who used Skype for years, the practical question now is not whether the app is still alive. It is how much of their old account history they want to rescue before the export window closes.
