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The popularity of the Signal messaging service has exploded in recent weeks, largely due to concerns surrounding recent changes to WhatsApp’s terms of service. But it seems that the service does not adapt perfectly to the demand. Several anecdotal reports state that Signal is down and is at the top of the Downdetector Fault Aggregator charts at the time of writing. However, the company is aware of the problem and is working on a fix.
the game decreases and I am free
the signal goes down and I’m anxious
– Tony Romm (@TonyRomm) January 15, 2021
While you can’t really trust Downdetector in isolation, it’s usually a good indicator that something might be wrong with a given service, and anecdotal reports on other sites like Twitter point to issues as well. In some cases, users indicate that they cannot connect, stating that they are “disconnected” and “verify your network connection”. Others just can’t send messages.
Same. Impossible to connect.
– David ImeI (@DurvidImel) January 15, 2021
Based on the reports, people started having issues about an hour ago, around 10 a.m. ET, with the pace of reports picking up dramatically in the past hour. As far as we can tell, Signal has yet to publicly acknowledge the outage.
For strangers, Signal is a privacy-focused messaging service available on Android, iOS, and Windows that offers secure and encrypted communication. It’s open source and run by a non-profit organization, and a popular alternative to services like WhatsApp and Hangouts.
It’s no surprise that Signal runs into a problem like this, given the pace of growth seen recently. Based on Play Store metrics, its user base grew at least 5x last week alone, and that ignores other platforms. The real numbers could be closer to 10 or 20X over the past two weeks. With such an explosion in numbers, growing pains are inevitable and current downtime is to be expected.
Signal tells us that it is fixing the problem and should be back to normal shortly.
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