Overview
- A major AWS failure on October 20 caused intermittent downtime across services, including Signal, Snapchat and Duolingo.
- Elon Musk told followers he no longer trusts Signal and promoted X Chat as an encrypted alternative.
- Signal president Meredith Whittaker said the outage did not jeopardize message privacy because Signal does not hold users’ decryption keys.
- Developers and security researchers flagged longstanding concerns about reproducible builds and the difficulty of verifying app-store binaries.
- X labels X Chat as beta and has said it plans to make security verification easier in the future.