Following a day and a half of difficulties, Signal’s cross-platform messaging service is operational again. Both Signal’s Twitter and status dashboard indicate things are back to normal, and following the influx of literally millions of new users to the service, we can all enjoy more private and secure communications.
Reports of problems first began on Friday at around 10 AM ET. The pace of reports has since diminished, with most claiming that issues have now been resolved.
Symptoms during the outage varied. Early on, folks had trouble even connecting and logging in. Later on, when things began coming back up at Signal, there was a mix of folks able to send but not receive messages, and conversations among certain platform combinations (like iOS to iOS) worked, while others didn’t. In most cases, there was an ongoing error message banner that stated: “Signal is experiencing technical difficulties. We are working hard to restore service as quickly as possible.”
The popularity of the Signal messaging service has been exploding in the last few weeks, in large part due to concerns surrounding the recent changes to WhatsApp’s terms of service. For the unfamiliar, Signal is a privacy-centric messaging service available on Android, iOS, and desktop (including Windows, macOS, and Linux) that offers secure and encrypted communication. It’s open source and run by a non-profit, and a popular alternative to services like WhatsApp and Hangouts.
It isn’t surprising that Signal ran into an issue like this, given the pace of growth that it’s seen recently. Based on Play Store metrics, its userbase is up at least 5X in the last week alone, and that’s ignoring other platforms. The true numbers could be closer to 10 or 20X. With an explosion in new users like that, growing pains like these are basically inevitable, and today’s downtime is to be expected.
Signal originally told us around 11 AM ET on Friday, 1/15 that it was fixing the issue and that it would be back to normal shortly, though that resolution took a little bit longer than expected. Given how quickly the service has grown recently, we can’t blame them for being sudden victims of their own success. Learning how to scale is hard, and literally millions of people have been joining the service in just the last few days.
