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The newly popular Signal messaging service has been suffering issues for the last day or so. While it has started working again for some users and in certain platform combinations, reports of issues continue, and the Signal status dashboard indicates ongoing technical difficulties. The company’s acknowledgments indicate the outage is tied to growing pain from its rapid growth and the crazy influx of new users. However, we’re told it is working on a fix, and Signal appreciates customer patience in the meantime.
We have been adding new servers and extra capacity at a record pace every single day this week nonstop, but today exceeded even our most optimistic projections. Millions upon millions of new users are sending a message that privacy matters. We appreciate your patience.
— Signal (@signalapp) January 15, 2021
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. Reports of issues first began on Friday at around 10 AM ET. The pace of reports has since diminished, with some claiming that the service works when messaging others on certain platforms, though other combinations continue to suffer difficulties, and Signal’s official status dashboard indicates that problems continue.
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Some users can log in and receive some messages, with those sent during the outage arriving as a “bad encrypted message.” Others say they can send but not receive messages, or that conversations between certain platform combinations (like iOS to iOS) work, while others don’t. Most report an ongoing error message banner that states: “Signal is experiencing technical difficulties. We are working hard to restore service as quickly as possible.”
One of the error messages Signal users might see during the outage. Thanks: Nicholas Blasgen.
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.
slack goes down and i am free
signal goes down and i am anxious
— Tony Romm (@TonyRomm) January 15, 2021
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. With an explosion in new users like that, growing pains like these are basically inevitable, and today’s downtime is to be expected.
I think the @signalapp apps DDoS’ed the server. Servers ran over capacity due to influx of users and started to return HTTP 508 which was not handled by the app and millions of apps started retrying the connection at once. Judging from recent commits in https://t.co/KD6kS2o9wt
— Daniel Novak (@NovakDaniel) January 16, 2021
Signal 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 it appears a resolution may be taking a little bit longer than originally planned. 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.
