Sometimes, the first you hear of a product or service is when the company responsible for it announces its death. So it is with Chime, Amazon’s Zoom alternative, that most people will have never heard of until now.
Amazon Is Shutting Down Chime, Whatever That Is/Was
As announced in an AWS blog post, Amazon Chime will soon be no more. Amazon has stopped accepting new Chime customers (effective from February 19, 2025), with support ending entirely on February 20, 2026.
Until then, existing customers, which is anyone who “created an Amazon Chime Team or Enterprise account prior to February 19, 2025,” can continue to use Amazon Chime features such as business calling and hosting meetings.
Amazon isn’t replacing Chime with another in-house app for meetings. Instead, according to a report by Business Insider, it’s opting for Zoom. Amazon is also recommending Zoom as one of the alternate solutions for existing Chime customers, along with Webex and Slack.
I’ll confess that I had never even heard of Amazon Chime until today, at the very point I’m writing about its demise. And I would hazard a guess that most other people are also now just hearing about its existence for the first time.
Even worse, those who did know about it, and were forced to use it to do business with Amazon, don’t seem to have had much good to say about Chime. I only know because a quick search for “Amazon Chime” on X brings up a wall of negative comments around the service.
So, perhaps it’s a good thing that Amazon is now ditching Chime.
Amazon Is Currently Purging Several Unloved Services
Also of note is the fact that Chime is just one of a whole series of products, services, and features that Amazon has shuttered this week. Others include the Amazon Appstore on Android, its TikTok-like Inspire feed, and the option to download and transfer Kindle books via USB.
We don’t know why Amazon is embarking on a purge of various services at this time. However, it could be an effort to clear out some deadwood before launching its new and improved (hopefully) Alexa virtual assistant, which is rumored to be getting an AI upgrade in the very near future.
