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Skype Going to the Cloud – No More Support for Older Devices

July 21, 2016

In the beginning days of Skype, the technical architecture was peer-to-peer (P2P). This meant that the data flows would bounce around among the various nodes in a somewhat unpredictable pattern. Those days are rapidly coming to an end. The Skype network has gone through several generational modifications ever since Microsoft acquired it. The original P2P network was very unstable, especially when a large number of peers went offline. This occurred in 2011 when a software bug caused a ton of clients to crash, effectively knocking Skype off the grid. Microsoft first helped stabilize Skype by adding dedicated supernodes in 2012. This meant that ultimately all Skype traffic was under Microsoft's control.

Recently, Microsoft is transitioning Skype from P2P to a cloud service. The migration isn't complete yet, but is expected to be done in the "coming months." Along with the migration to the cloud, Microsoft will continue to support Skype on iOS 8, Android 4.03 and Windows 10 Mobile. This means that users of Windows Phone 8 or older Android devices will no longer get any updates going forward. I would guess that those users will no longer be able to communicate via Skype, especially once the P2P network is shut down.

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