Messaging service Signal suffers from outage

Due to a malfunction at Signal, users have been unable to send messages since Friday afternoon. On social media and Downdetector, users are complaining about connection problems. The failure may be due to its increasing popularity.

Signal confirms the fault on Twitter. It is unknown what caused the outage and how long the problems will last.

Last week Signal gained a lot of new users. The number of downloads in the Play Store increased from 10 million to more than 50 million. The rapid increase in Signal users may have something to do with the outage, but the company behind the encrypted chat app does not confirm that.

Many people have recently switched to Signal after WhatsApp’s terms were changed by parent company Facebook. The adjusted conditions allow Facebook to use more data from WhatsApp users. This does not apply to Europeans due to European legislation.