The new UWP Skype client. (credit: Microsoft)
It has been a slow transition, but Skype is finalizing its move away from a peer-to-peer system to a cloud-based one.
When it was first created, the Skype network was built as a decentralized peer-to-peer system. PCs that had enough processing power and bandwidth would be elected as “supernodes” and used to coordinate connections between other machines on the network. Similarly, text, voice, and video traffic would flow between peers, directly when possible (when intervening firewalls and routers were cooperative) or indirectly through other systems on the network when required.
This peer-to-peer system was generally perceived as being relatively private; with no central servers the assumption was that there was no central ability to perform wiretaps or other forms of eavesdropping. This belief was in fact mistaken.
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Source: Ars Technica – Skype finalizes its move to the cloud, ignores the elephant in the room