Microsoft"s acquisition of Skype back in October 2011 has apparently resulted in a major change in how Skype"s network infrastructure has been organized. According to researcher Kostya Kortchinsky of Immunity Security, the change involves Skype ditching its previous peer-to-peer network of client-hosted supernodes.
This network setup has been in place since Skype launched in 2003 and involved as many as 48,000 clients, most of them regular Skype users. Now Kortchinsky claims that his research has revealed Skype has switched over to 10,000 Linux-based PCs for its network, all of which are hosted by Skype"s new parent Microsoft.
This new system will allow each Linux PC to handle as many as 100,000 Skype clients, according to Kortchinsky. In a chat with Ars Technica, he states, "It"s pretty good for security reasons because then you don"t rely on random people running random stuff on their machine. You just have something that"s centralized and secure."
This new network, which was apparently established a couple of months ago, was put in place just as Skype saw a spike in users. Microsoft said a couple of weeks ago that Skype generated a whopping 100 billion minutes of calls in the first quarter of 2012, up a massive 40 percent from the same period a year ago.