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Amazon introduced its Chime meeting app in 2017. (Amazon Image)
There will be no more apologies about Chime from Amazon employees to outsiders joining their meetings.
That ritual of logging on to an Amazon Chime meeting will become a thing of the past with the news that the company is ending support for its meeting and calling application one year from now, on Feb. 20, 2026.
It’s an example of Amazon paring back in an area where its impact was limited beyond its own virtual walls. In fact, the biggest impact will be inside Amazon: the company is shifting to Zoom as its default for virtual meetings.
“When we decide to retire a service or feature, it is typically because we’ve introduced something better or our partners offer a solution that is a good fit for our customers as well as our own employees,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement. “In Chime’s case, its use outside of Amazon was limited, and our partners offer great collaboration solutions, so we will lean into those.”
The move not impact the Chime SDK, which lets customers put communications features in their own apps, Amazon points out in its support update.
Meanwhile, Amazon is rolling out Microsoft 365 applications across the company, including Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and SharePoint, in addition to Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, and Loop.
Amazon told employees in a memo, “Zoom is replacing Amazon Chime as the standard meeting application for Amazon internal meetings,” noting that Microsoft Teams can also be used “where full integration with M365 is needed.” Webex will be another option for meetings with customers who use the Cisco tool
Business Insider was first to report on Amazon’s shift to Zoom.
Zoom is a big Amazon customer, noting in its annual report that it uses Amazon Web Services and Oracle Cloud “for the hosting of certain critical aspects of our business, as well as Microsoft Azure for limited customer-specified managed services.”
Even though Amazon is rolling out Microsoft 365 applications, it makes sense for the company to go with Zoom as its internal default rather than Microsoft Teams, given Zoom’s status as a partner/customer, and Microsoft’s position as a rival to Amazon Web Services through its Azure cloud platform.
Amazon unveiled Chime in February 2017, building on its 2015 acquisition of Biba, a San Francisco-based company that makes chat, video and audio conferencing tools for businesses, as reported by GeekWire at the time.
Chime was basically adequate, based on our occasional experience using it to meet virtually with people inside Amazon, but it was missing many of the advanced features of other virtual meeting services.
The lack of widespread use also meant that it took the uninitiated a little longer to figure out how to join a meeting and change settings for audio and video, etc., which was the primary reason for those apologies.
