I doubt many people are mourning the demise of Skype. The sky-blue platform that revolutionized the video call, the medium for long-distance relationships in the early 2010s, had not been relevant for almost a decade when Microsoft announced its impending death. My own relationship with Skype’s clunky tangle of video, voice and chat peaked in 2011 – the same year Microsoft purchased it for a headline-making $8.5bn, only to let it wither in the shadow of professionalized, less-pixelated options. By 2014, it was basically obsolete, as video calls shifted to more integrated apps like FaceTime, and my college schedule did not allow for glitchy, hours-long catchups. Snapchat was far more efficient.
Like most people, I barely touched Skype from the mid-2010s on; the news that Microsoft will shutter it on 4 May and fold its data into the free version of Teams prompted me to log back in for the first time in five years. All that remained of my formerly thriving Skype life – once a log of video calls picked up and put down, peppered with chats pleading to “pleaseeeeeeee call me back bitchhhh (:” – were a handful of spam crypto chats and phishing links from former favorites who had long quit the platform, as well.
