Microsoft and Facebook have a long history together - Microsoft in 2007 invested $240 million in what was at the time a promising young social networking company. In December, Facebook unceremoniously stopped using Microsoft Bing to provide Web search results on its social network. The demise of the Skype partnership represents the second major example of Facebook cutting ties with Microsoft recently. But for the Facebook and Skype partnership, announced with so much fanfare in 2011, it seems that it was officially the beginning of the end. This change was made because Skype-powered video calls required users to install a browser plugin, while the technology that Facebook whipped up works without one - important for call performance, video quality, and for letting Facebook make changes and upgrades to video chat more quickly, according to a person familiar with the matter.įor users, the change was basically invisible. While no announcements have ever been made, we started to suspect Facebook and Skype were no longer quite so close in 2013, after Facebook introduced a voice calling option that used its own technology.īut the real rupture appears to have happened a few months back when Facebook quietly stopped using Skype for video calls made from the desktop, replacing Skype with technology that Facebook developed in-house, Facebook confirmed to Business Insider. Today, with the launch of video calling in Facebook Messenger for iPhone and Android, there’s no longer any doubt: Facebook and Skype have broken up, and Skype seems to be the one who was dumped.

“ Steve and I are really aligned on this,” Mark Zuckerberg said at the time.

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