Signal recovers from outage caused by influx of new users

Signal is now fully operational after a day-long outage caused by an influx of WhatsApp users joining the service.

Following the release of WhatsApp’s new privacy policy, millions of users have switched to rival platforms like Signal. Due to the influx of new users, the app had issues with messaging and sign-ins.

“Thanks to the millions of new Signal users around the world for your patience. Your capacity for understanding inspired us while we expanded capacity,†Signal tweeted.

“As an unfortunate side effect of this outage, users might see errors in some of their chats. This does *not* affect your chat’s security, but you may have missed a message from that contact.â€

Signal notes that although the outage may have caused some missed messages, these issues should be automatically resolved with future updates.

WhatsApp has delayed its new privacy policy amid confusion about its data-sharing practices with Facebook, its parent company. The policy was originally supposed to go into effect on February 8th, and users had to agree to it in order to continue using the app. This date has now been extended to May 15th.

Although WhatsApp has reiterated that conversations are protected with end-to-end encryption and that it can’t read users’ messages, the damage is already done.

Millions of users have left the app for Signal and Telegram. Signal saw 1.3 million new sign-ups on January 11th alone and Telegram saw 25 million new sign-ups over a span of three days.

Source: Signal