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. But it looks like the service may not be scaling perfectly in response to demand. Several anecdotal reports indicate that Signal is down, and it’s at the top of outage aggregator Downdetector’s charts at the time of writing. However, the company is aware of the issue and working on a fix.
slack goes down and i am free
signal goes down and i am anxious
— Tony Romm (@TonyRomm) January 15, 2021
While you can’t really trust Downdetector in isolation, it’s usually a good indicator that something could be up with a given service, and anecdotal reports at other venues such as Twitter also indicate trouble. In some cases, users indicate they’re unable to log in, stating they are “disconnected” and to “check your network connection.” Others simply can’t send messages.
Same. Can’t log in.
— David ImeI (@DurvidImel) January 15, 2021
Based on reports, folks started running into issues around an hour ago, near 10AM ET, with the pace of reports picking up significantly over the last hour. So far as we can tell, Signal has yet to publicly acknowledge the outage.
For the unfamiliar, Signal is a privacy-centric messaging service available on Android, iOS, and Windows 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 would run 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 in the last week or two. With an explosion in numbers like that, growing pains are inevitable, and today’s downtime is to be expected.
Signal tells us it’s currently fixing the issue, and it should be back to normal shortly.
