Skype, the phone and messaging app owned by Microsoft, has quietly stopped letting users add cash to their accounts and buy Skype phone numbers. This is bad news for anyone who still uses it. Instead, Skype is switching into SaaS mode, which means that users are being forced to sign up for monthly plans for both local and international Skype-to-phone calls. This will likely affect millions of people. Microsoft said last year that Skype had 36 million daily active users, which is the most current information they gave out.
Microsoft did not make the change official: It wasn’t known about until last week, when a volunteer moderator on a Microsoft website replied to a user who couldn’t add money to their Skype account.
A Microsoft representative told Parhlo World that the company has stopped selling new Skype credit and numbers for good. They also said that the company “continuously evaluates product strategy based on customer usage and needs.” Existing Skype phone numbers and credit can still be used, but users will need to use their credit at least once every 180 days for it to stay valid.
Founder Of
Over the years, Skype has been one of the first companies to offer calling and chatting over the internet. It was started in Luxembourg, Europe, in 2003, and was one of the first large-scale, disruptive consumer VoIP services. It let people make free voice calls over the internet, skipping standard phone lines and the costs of long-distance calls. Later, it got support for video chat, instant messaging, and file sharing. These were huge steps forward for messaging apps and became standard features for all of them.
Over the years, the business has also tried to get new owners. When eBay bought Skype for $4.1 billion in 2005, the e-commerce giant had big plans to grow. These plans didn’t work out, though, and eBay sold Skype to a private group four years later for $2.75 billion. When Skype went public for the first time in 2010, it was reported that it had 560 million registered users and 124 million monthly active users, but only 6% paid for premium services. Microsoft swooped in and bought Skype for $8.5 billion in 2011, and it has been owned by Microsoft ever since.
The service has always been free for people to talk to each other on Skype. It made money by charging people to call landlines or cell phones. It had another paid service where users could buy a local phone number and make and receive calls as if they were in a certain country. Skype also made money by selling a different service to businesses.
But people no longer use Skype. Instead, they use apps like WhatsApp and Zoom for texting, video calls, and other things. In a strange twist, Microsoft was one of the companies that was fighting when Teams came out in 2016. Teams finally took over the Skype for Business product as part of a push for consolidation. As a result, Skype has been on a downward trend for a while now, as Microsoft’s main goal is to become a giant in cloud infrastructure.
It’s been a long time since Microsoft officially released Skype usage numbers. This could be because the company hasn’t tried to promote them, or the numbers didn’t show a very good picture.
Microsoft said in March 2020, though, that Skype had grown to 40 million daily users as people looked for ways to stay in touch with family and friends during lockdown. It said this was a 70% month-over-month rise, which means that about 23.5 million people used it every day, but it didn’t say how many of these people were Skype-to-Skype calls. After that, the company told Parhlo World in a follow-up message that 100 million people used it every month.
A Microsoft representative said the company wouldn’t say how many active Skype users there are right now. While the company said in a blog post last year that the Bing search engine would be coming to Skype, “more than 36 million people use Skype every day to connect through phone calls and chats across borders and around the world,”
That’s it! The changes that happened last week probably affect tens of millions of people who only used Skype for its phone feature. Modern messaging apps like WhatsApp don’t have this feature, but Zoom does have a product called Phone that’s more geared toward businesses.
It’s still hard to understand why Skype still promotes both Skype Credit and Skype numbers in different web areas. Even when users are logged in through the web, Skype still asks them to buy credit, but it doesn’t let them finish the transaction.
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“Sales of new Skype numbers and Skype credit have been stopped for good,” the representative said. “For some customers, the interface for buying new Skype credit may still be visible in some entry points, but they won’t be able to make a payment.” We are aware of this problem and are working to make the required changes.
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