The timeline
- 28 February 2025. Microsoft announced that Skype would close and that Skype accounts could sign in to Microsoft Teams Free, bringing chats and contacts with them.
- 5 May 2025. Skype stopped working. Signing in to Skype led to Teams Free instead.
- After that. Microsoft said it would keep Skype data until January 2026 for people who hadn't moved to Teams, and later extended the window for downloading an export (its support page, updated 20 December 2025, gave June 2026).
Both of those dates have now passed. Microsoft's support pages are the place to check for anything newer.
If you moved to Teams Free
If you signed in to Teams Free with your Skype account before the deadline, your chats and contacts should be in Teams. Open Teams Free with the same Microsoft account.
If you downloaded an export
Your history is in that file, usually named like 8_live_yourname_export.tar. Keep it somewhere safe and back it up: it may be the only copy. You can read it on this page; here is how.
If you only chose Conversations, you have the messages but not the photos. If you also chose Files, there is a second download with the photos and documents. See photos and files.
If you did neither
Microsoft has said that Skype data not moved or exported is deleted after the deadline. Kept Chats cannot recover it, and nobody outside Microsoft can. Be careful with any service that promises to recover deleted Skype history from Microsoft's servers.
There may still be copies on your own devices:
- Old computers and backups. Skype 7 and earlier kept history in a file called
main.db. If you have an old laptop, hard drive or backup from before about 2017, it may be there. Kept Chats can open it (in beta): how to find and open main.db. - The other person. The people you talked to may have exported their own copy of the same conversations.
- Emails and saved photos. Skype sometimes emailed missed messages, and photos you saved are in your own photo library.