Skype Chat History for Court: What Actually Happened to Your Data
If you're looking for how to export Skype messages right now, the honest answer is: for most accounts, that window has already closed. Skype itself shut down, and Microsoft has since completed a full deletion of Skype chat history. Here's exactly what happened, when, and the one real exception worth checking before you assume everything is lost.
The timeline
May 5, 2025 — Skype shut down
Microsoft retired Skype as a consumer product. Existing users were pointed toward Microsoft Teams (the free consumer version) as the replacement.
April 1, 2026 — deletion began
Microsoft began deleting Skype chat and call history from its servers, while keeping a data-export portal open for anyone who still needed to pull their own history first.
June 15, 2026 — the export window closed for good
The export portal closed on this date, and anything not already exported, migrated, or otherwise preserved was permanently deleted. Microsoft does not offer a way to recover it after this point — there is no support ticket or account-recovery path that brings deleted Skype history back.
The one exception: Teams Free migration
If you were an active Skype user between December 2024 and February 2025, and you then moved to and actually used Microsoft Teams Free before December 1, 2025, your Skype chat and call history should still be accessible through Teams. If that describes your situation, check Teams before concluding the conversation is gone — it may genuinely still be there, just under a different app.
If you already have an old export sitting somewhere
If you exported your Skype data before the June 15, 2026 deadline, the archive would have arrived as a .tar file that extracts into JSON files — one structure per conversation, with sender, timestamp, and message content for each entry. If you have one of these sitting in an old downloads folder, it's still usable evidence; the deletion only affected data still on Microsoft's servers, not copies you already downloaded. Reformatting the relevant conversation's messages into a CSV — one row per message, with columns for sender, timestamp, and message text — lets Verity's generic CSV reader work with it; see our CSV formatting guide for exactly what it needs. Verity does not have a dedicated Skype-JSON parser, since the export format no longer exists as a live, repeatable path for new users.
If Skype history matters to an active or upcoming case
If neither an old export nor a Teams migration applies to you, the practical options are limited: check whether the other party to the conversation preserved a copy on their end (subject to the same discovery rules as any other message evidence), check whether your device has a local cache or backup from before the shutdown, or talk to an attorney about what, if anything, is recoverable through other means. A deleted platform is not automatically an excuse to ignore a preservation duty that existed before the deletion happened — if a case was reasonably anticipated while Skype was still live and exportable, the fact that Microsoft has since deleted the data doesn't necessarily resolve the question of whether that history should have been preserved.
This is general information, not legal advice. Verity is not a law firm — talk to an attorney about preservation obligations and what a court will expect regarding evidence on a discontinued platform.
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