While it was known that Windows Phone support for Skype was coming to an end, few actually expected the service to be actually switched off.

Vole has now announced that as well as ending support for Skype on Windows Phone in October and that the app will simply stop working. Microsoft is planning to move the operation to the cloud for Windows 10 and can't be bothered taking the old version of Windows Phone with it.

The company has already said that the future of Skype is cloud-based rather than peer-to-peer, and this is the reason Windows Phone support is coming to a complete stop. Considering the amount of investment Microsoft has put into Skype, the decision to kill the app entirely is perhaps a little strange, but legacy support -- particularly for such a niche handset -- does not come cheap.

A spokesVole said: "While support will no longer be available from October 2016, the Skype app on Windows Phone 8 and Windows Phone 8.1 will continue to work (possibly with some limitations) until early 2017, when we finish moving Skype calling to the cloud (see Skype blog)."

While it is unlikely that this will effect many people, it is more of a sign how little Microsoft cares about hacking off WIndows Phone users. It does not seem to recongised that sticking with Microsoft on mobile for all that time took a special kind of devotion not normally seen in Microsoft users.