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Signal is having technical difficulties

status.signal.org

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Re: Signal is having technical difficulties

#41

Post by faitswulff »

hcurtiss wrote: post #40

This is not good. I've moved so many people over in the last week. For purposes of getting them invested, this is a truly inopportune moment for an extended outage.

But it’s par for the course for newly popular services. Some don’t survive the popularity and some thrive in spite of the degraded service. Signal will figure it out. All the best to the engineering team at Signal right now!

Re: Signal is having technical difficulties

#44

Post by konart »

fastball wrote: post #21
mahdyarhp wrote: post #14

They are not Telegram. They can't handle millions of users in a short period of time, although it's not on them, it's Telegram's magic.

I think it's less magic and more the lack of E2EE.

I'm not familiar with encryption and how does either of services work on the backend, but shouldn't E2E happen on users devices? (like... end to end). And if that's the case - how does this impact Signal's infrastructure?

Re: Signal is having technical difficulties

#45

Post by bzb6 »

rcMgD2BwE72F wrote: post #18

Nice workaround for Android users: tap and hold the send button to switch to SMS (insecure but still) https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007321171-Ca... You'll keep all your message history in Signal that way. Good to know when your contact don't have an Internet connection, too.

What a workaround. SMS are not encrypted, cost money, have a length limit, don’t support images or groups...

Re: Signal is having technical difficulties

#46

Post by entropea »

hcurtiss wrote: post #40

This is not good. I've moved so many people over in the last week. For purposes of getting them invested, this is a truly inopportune moment for an extended outage.

I"m not saying this is what happened this time, but I would suspect we'll see a lot more outages of encrypted centralized chat like this as nation states try to prevent general society from moving away from the social media websites almost solely designed for mass surveillance.

Re: Signal is having technical difficulties

#48

Post by _flux »

mahdyarhp wrote: post #14

They are not Telegram. They can't handle millions of users in a short period of time, although it's not on them, it's Telegram's magic.

They are (were?) hosted partially on Amazon, which should be able to scale quite nicely.

If the system is built for it, that is.

Though on 2018 there was some noise from Amazon about stopping their hosting due to practice called "Domain Fronting", no idea what came out of it. At least signal.org is hosted on Google.

Re: Signal is having technical difficulties

#49

Post by Reedx »

okso wrote: post #17
kortex wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought signal was highly decentralized? What traffic does the server handle once two clients have "found" each other? Which I believe uses hashes of phone numbers.

This article from 2018 illustrates the architecture of Signal: https://sorincocorada.ro/signal-messanger-architecture/

Based on that, they use Google, Apple, Twilio and AWS in the backend. All who have shown they are willing to deplatform with little notice as the result of kneejerk public pressure.

How easily can Signal replace those dependencies if this comes for them?

"Extremists move to secret online channels": https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/extremists-move-se...

Re: Signal is having technical difficulties

#50

Post by bzb6 »

tomp wrote: post #4

At least they tell you about it - there's a banner on the top of the app. Last time WhatsApp was having issues, it didn't give any indication - messages just weren't being delivered (but as a user, there's no way to distinguish between "no messages" and "messages not being delivered").

Last time WhatsApp was having issues, a “Connecting” banner was shown permanently on the app and all outgoing messages displayed a clock instead of a tick, showing that they weren’t reaching the server.
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