Skype Celebrates 40 Million Concurrent Users Milestone

It looks like Skype use hasn’t slowed down at all after Microsoft acquired the company last year for $8.5 billion. And in the last couple of months, they have been announcing milestone after milestone on their blog. Near the end of February, they broke a record with 32 million concurrent users. Just a few weeks later, 34 million users. That record only lasted a few days, as they announced 35 million concurrent users.

And now, another record: 40 million concurrent users.

According to the blog post, you can visualize that number by thinking about the total number of people on earth about “three to four millennia ago.”

Well, the world certainly has changed a lot since then. Today, we have seven billion people on Earth, and there are centers of commerce almost everywhere. With changes in technology and mechanized forms of transportation, letters (surprisingly) still takes days to get from person to person, while email takes just seconds.

But one of the biggest changes is one we reached today – when 40 million concurrent users were signed onto Skype all at once. This is a massive new milestone for a simple piece of software that helps make meaningful connections a cool part of people’s lives every single day.

Tony Bates, President of the Skype Division at Microsoft had this to say:

And Microsoft is definitely proud if its acquisition:

What could have possibly pushed Skype from 35 million to 40 million concurrent users so quickly? Maybe it was those ads bashing Twitter and Facebook, who knows?