Amazon Kills Chime, Adopts Zoom and Microsoft 365

Amazon is no longer accepting new customers for Chime ahead of ending support for the business video conferencing service in 2026. And it revealed internally that it is adopting Zoom as a replacement for Chime while also finally rolling out Microsoft 365.

“Amazon Chime is a communications service that lets you meet, chat, and place business calls inside and outside your organization, all using a single application,” a new post to Amazon’s AWS Messaging & Targeting Blog reads. “After careful consideration, we have decided to end support for the Amazon Chime service, including Business Calling features, effective February 20, 2026. Existing customers can continue to use Amazon Chime features, including Business Calling, scheduling and hosting meetings, adding and managing users, and other capabilities supported through the Amazon Chime administration console.”

Amazon provides customers with documentation for transitioning from Chime to other services like Slack and Zoom. And it will be making a similar transition itself. The cloud giant once eyed competing with Microsoft, Slack, and Zoom in this space with products like WorkDocs and Chime. But both are now dead: Amazon killed WorkDocs, a document sharing and collaboration solution, in early 2024.

It’s pretty clear that Amazon is caught in a weird place in which it must confront the inevitability of Microsoft 365 while trying to use it as little as possible. Amazon agreed to deploy Microsoft 365 internally at a reported cost of $1 billion over five years in late 2023, but it paused that rollout in late 2024 because of concerns about security. It said at the time that they were “in a good place to start redeployment” in 2025.

Well, that is apparently underway. According to an internal memo viewed by Bloomberg, Amazon’s (re)deployment of Microsoft 365 internally has already started and will proceed “on a rolling basis” across its workforce.

Bloomberg also notes that Amazon will replace Chime internally with Zoom “as the standard meeting application for Amazon internal meetings.” (And it admitted to the publication that Chime usage outside of Amazon was “limited,” triggering this shift.) Zoom feels like an unnecessary expense, given that Amazon is already paying for Microsoft 365, which includes Teams, and the company plans to use Teams for meetings, too, when “full integration with M365 is needed.” But it will also use Cisco Webex for meetings with customers who use that product, and so its use of Zoom is perhaps tied to external customer usage too.

That Amazon’s use of multiple messaging and meeting solutions is as convoluted as anyone else’s is perhaps not surprising. But the cloud giant once aimed to take on Microsoft–and Google and Slack–in this space and failed badly, forcing it to adopt solutions made by erstwhile competitors. In many ways, this mirrors what we saw in the 1990s when companies like Novel tried to take on Microsoft and Office similarly, and with the same results.