Skype, once the go-to app for making calls on the internet, is shutting down after several key missteps and the rise of more user-friendly competitors.

The big picture: Skype, a big hit during the early 2000s, failed to keep up with competitors and wasn't able to claw back during the pandemic when demand for video calling spiked.

Driving the news: Microsoft announced on Friday that it will shut down Skype on May 5 and replace the 21-year-old calling and messaging service with the free version of Microsoft Teams for consumers.

Former President Donald Trump’s campaign said Saturday that some of its internal communications had been hacked.

The acknowledgment came after POLITICO began receiving emails from an anonymous account with documents from inside Trump’s operation.

A hacking group linked to the Iranian government tried to breach the email accounts of presidential campaign staffers as part of a wider effort to gather intelligence ahead of the US election, Microsoft Corp. said Friday.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s campaign said Saturday that it had been hacked and blamed Iran for breaking into its data, days after Microsoft revealed the terror-backing nation has been ramping up online activity in an attempt to influence the US election.

Trump spokesman Steven Cheung made the announcement following report from Politico that said the outlet had received anonymous emails that included documents from inside Trump’s campaign operation.

The global Microsoft computer outage initiated by a faulty CrowdStrike security update gave us a taste of what actual cyberwarfare could do.

Starting soon after midnight New York time, the glitched update brought the “blue screen of death” to PCs across the world.

Microsoft has issued advice to users after a massive outage linked to U.S. cybersecurity company Crowdstrike caused users' systems to suddenly crash.

"We have been made aware of an issue impacting Virtual Machines running Windows Client and Windows Server, running the CrowdStrike Falcon agent, which may encounter a bug check (BSOD) and get stuck in a restarting state," an update posted on the Microsoft Azure website said on Friday morning. "We approximate impact started around 19:00 UTC on the 18th of July."

I’m willing to bet that, until this morning, most people had never heard of CrowdStrike, an Austin-based cybersecurity firm. Only after the company pushed a bad update onto Windows computers, creating the biggest IT disaster in history, did most of us realize how much our lives depend on it. Or how difficult it might be to fix the problem.