Skype Hits 40 Million Simultaneous Users!

Congrats to the folks at Skype for hitting over 40 million concurrent users! Today at 2pm US Eastern when I typed “/users” in any Skype chat on my Mac, I got this great message (Windows users should see the count in the lower left corner of the Skype client):

Skype 40million

That’s a pretty amazing milestone, given that some of us can remember back to when the concurrent user count was in the upper 20s (early 2011) or even way back to the earlier days when it was down in the low millions (2007). This time of day has historically been one of the highest times, so I expect that we’ll see the count drop off for the remainder of the day and then hit this number again tomorrow around early afternoon US Eastern time.

Hudson Barton has an interesting trend chart showing the growth of Skype users over time:

SkypeStatistics Aaytch

The jump in the last quarter has been particularly dramatic – and probably has much to do with the expanded availability of Skype on smartphones and other devices.

Regardless of the reason, it’s a rather amazing milestone. Congrats to the folks at Skype!

P.S. Skype now has a blog post up about this milestone as well.

UPDATE #1 – A couple of folks have asked about how Skype can have 40 million people online concurrently. The answer is that Skype uses a peer-to-peer (P2P) network architecture. I explained a bit of this back in November 2010 in “A Brief Primer on the Tech Behind Skype, P2PSIP and P2P Networks“. Those of you seeking more info may find that post – and the related links – useful.

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3 thoughts on “Skype Hits 40 Million Simultaneous Users!”

  3. Dan York

    Mick,
    What are you looking for as an alternative? There are many different VoIP services out there that use various softphones to enable you to call people globally. Some of them support voice, video and chat like Skype does. All the IM services like AOL, Yahoo!Messenger, etc. also generally support voice and video. Facebook has some apps that do this, too. There are also a whole range of apps for mobile devices (iOS, Android) that provide voice/video/chat communication between users and sometimes out to the PSTN.
    I haven’t yet seen a solution that has the same huge userbase as Skype does, nor one that really provides as integrated a directory and user experience as Skype does… but many people are trying to do this.
    Dan

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