# Skype got shouted down by Teams and Zoom. But it revolutionised human connection

The company that pioneered voice communication over the internet has withered to dust in Microsoft’s hands. Still, I for one am grateful for it.

## Sat 8 Mar 2025 11.00 EST

Last modified on Sat 8 Mar 2025 16.47 EST

 

Skype was the first company to bring this magic to ordinary consumers. It was founded in 2003 by Janus Friis (a Dane) and Niklas Zennström (a Swede) and headquartered in Luxembourg; but the software that powered it was written by three Estonians who also wrote software for peer-to-peer file sharing. In 2005, eBay bought it for $2.6bn (£2bn). By 2006 it had 100m registered users and by 2009 was adding about 380,000 new users each day and generating around $740m (£575m) in annual revenue. So you could say that  was the first European company to reach US-level scale.

> I grew up in a time when a phone call from the US meant only one thing: a death in the family. If emigrants kept in touch with the folks back home, it was only by letter

The internet has been around for much longer than most people realise. It goes back to the 1960s and the creation of Arpanet, a military computer network that emerged after the US had its “Sputnik moment” – the awful realisation that the Soviet Union seemed to be racing ahead in the technology stakes. The design of Arpanet’s successor, the internet we use today, started in the early 1970s and it was first switched on in January 1983.

The internet was a technology that pushed the boundaries of what was considered possible in communication systems. It could be digitised (converted into ones and zeroes) and put into data packets which could be sent over the internet; and then, having reached their destination, converted back into audio. The result: free telephony to anywhere in the world!

Skype was the first company to bring this magic to ordinary consumers. It was founded in 2003 by Janus Friis (a Dane) and Niklas Zennström (a Swede) and headquartered in Luxembourg; but the software that powered it was written by three Estonians who also wrote software for peer-to-peer file sharing. In 2005, eBay bought it for $2.6bn (£2bn). By 2006 it had 100m registered users and by 2009 was adding about 380,000 new users each day and generating around $740m (£575m) in annual revenue. So you could say that  was the first European company to reach US-level scale.

> I grew up in a country (Ireland) with a huge diaspora in a time when a phone call from the US meant only one thing: a death in the family. If emigrants kept in touch with the folks back home, it was only by letter and perhaps the odd parcel; never by phone. In rural Ireland, on the night before a son or a daughter departed for America or Australia, their family would sometimes hold a wake, because they assumed they would never hear their voices again.

And now? The VoIP technology that Skype brought into people’s lives has been commoditised. Social media platforms such as WhatsApp and Signal offer unlimited – and free – audio (and video) connections with friends, families, and colleagues all over the world. Phone calls that would once have bankrupted a family are made every day. Microsoft may not have found Skype useful in the end. But the rest of us certainly did.

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The first to bring the magic of free telephony to consumers: Skype, 2003-25. Photograph: Sheldon Cooper/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

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