Ask HN: Is Signal Down? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is Signal Down?

88 pointsabahlo72 comments

Mac app can't connect, iOS app doesn't send or receive any messages, a friend has the same problem.

Official confirmation:

https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1350118809860886528

EDIT: Interesting geographic usage data in the tweet replies. Most replies by far coming from Indian Signal users, many comparing Signal's reliability to WhatsApp. Also strong showing in the comments from Africa (esp. Nigeria) and the Middle East. I wonder how many joined Signal just recently in response to Facebook's changes to WhatsApp [0].

[0] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/whatsapp-pr...

As a long time signal and telegram user, I can say about 50 percent of my signal contacts joined after elon musk mentioned it. Not that there is any correlation to Elon.

My telegram feed has been abuzz the last couple of days with 'your friend has joined Telegram!'. Great to see and it's a nice chance to reconnect with friends I haven't talked with in a while.

It's all because of FB's recent changes.

As well as the Parler and Twitter purges.

A week before, Elon Musk:

> Use Signal[0]

[0] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1347165127036977153

They tweeted that they went from 10M+ to 50M+ installs on Google Play recently, so that’s probably what’s happening:

https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1349577579091566592?s=2...

Recently joined user of Signal with same problem. Left WhatsApp due to increasing Facebookification...

Just donated to the Signal non-profit to help them out buying better infrastructure: https://signal.org/donate/

DNS is resolving to 127.0.0.1

  wget https://textsecure-service.whispersystems.org/v1/config
  --2021-01-15 11:55:13--  https://textsecure-service.whispersystems.org/v1/config
  Resolving textsecure-service.whispersystems.org (textsecure-service.whispersystems.org)... 127.0.0.1
  Connecting to textsecure-service.whispersystems.org (textsecure-service.whispersystems.org)|127.0.0.1|:443... failed: Connection refused.

Edit: Looking at the logs, it went down before the DNS started resolving to loopback. This may be part of a mitigation.

Not every dns requests returns 127.0.0.1. It might be a mitigation for some kind of DDOS or something else...

Just donated some money to Signal. My only issues with the app has been minor usability ones but they'll fix those.

Signal the organization, the app, etc are all worthy of support and I for one thank Facebook for pushing millions of users into Signal.

Saw this on reddit, so copy/pasting for wider audience

Donate to them so they can buy more servers https://signal.org/donate/

* If you work in the US, many corporations will match your donation. Easy double of your donation

* Set https://smile.amazon.com to Signal, so your purchases on Amazon go to Signal

* Use services like Paypal to donate, that sends 100% of the money to the foundation

Donated. Perhaps that helps a tiny bit. https://signal.org/donate/

Same here, I threw them five bucks. I've been using Signal on a daily basis for awhile now, the least I can do is pay them something for it.

Use Matrix with Element! https://element.io/

> Matrix

> https://element.io/

You see why the matrix proto and apps around it are really complicated to the end user?

No cuz people also get that gMail or Outlook is different from eMail.

just signed up with hosted element. still gonna do p2p homeservers eventually but my group chats are currently disrupted so better to go here than hangouts telegram etc

We tried it out yesterday and it's ridiculous how convoluted it is and how difficult to do simple direct messages and groups. Groups couldn't be joined, I either couldn't find people or they couldn't find me. I really found the system intriguing but I can't imagine less tech savvy people to join as is.

The "downage" is intermittent; sending messages for me (middle of the US on Google Fiber) alternates between taking forever to send and straight-up failing. Desktop app keeps showing the yellow "Disconnected" banner. At first I thought Google Fiber was down again (it's snowing right now...) but checking #Signal on Twitter and DownDetector.com clued me in pretty quick that this was a Signal issue. I was wondering if a massive influx of users might lead to growth pains.

I'm not sure if this is because of all the new users, so maybe someone that has been using Signal for a while longer can pitch in: Is the Desktop experience really as bad as it has been over the past few days?

It took 4 minutes for me this morning to replay a chat of maybe 200 messages, and that's with one person. I can't even imagine how bad it must be with multiple big groups. Sending takes ages, often being out of sync with the phone app, and I get notifications for messages I replied to half an hour ago on my Desktop when unlocking my phone.

Not sure if I'd wanna stay on Signal at the moment if it stays like this, maybe Matrix is really the better choice - at least Element on the web is by far superior to signal.

The desktop experience, at least for me, has been amazing. Very fast and clean.

The download times for messages / etc have been MUCH slower recently. I’m thinking it’s because of the load they are experiencing. As more people donate and as they scale for the load I imagine (and hope) it might even be faster than it was before.

I've been using Signal for years. Normally things are good. I'm not surprised by the hiccups since their userbase went up by >5x in the past week. I imagine it is very difficult to deal with that kind of scaling in such a short period of time.

I've never really had any issues with it over the last year or so, but the last week has been a bit spotty - but then my contact list has tripled in length since the whatsapp privacy update and news coverage - so I think its likely that it is demand.

I've setup a matrix homeserver yesterday, and in the process of setting up bridges to Signal/IRC etc so I get a single app with all the chats.

I'm not sure what you need from a web/desktop experience, for me it is a chat app, that I can send an image or txt , I don't really need anything else. YMMV

I would suggest to let it settle down for a few days, then see how it is. I would think that all whatsapp replacements are going to be peaking in use for the next week or so as people try out different things.

i didnt know you could set up bridges for signal. what does your server look like in terms of users? i want to test it out but dont know what i need to get started (besides the guides and all), just with the server

At the moment, it is me and a handful of other tech friends who are setting up servers of their own.

We've been installing things manually to test out different parts, but I think I'll be switching to a docker setup this weekend (purely for ease of setup)

https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

There are all sorts of bridges and bots:

https://matrix.org/bridges/ https://matrix.org/bots/

Once I have it roughly figured out, I'll look at paying to get some redundancy sorted, and then stick to this as my communications going forward.

I use Signal every day for 1:1 messages and a 1:2 group. There's basically no noticeable lag normally, i have very few complaints about the raw message functionality of Signal.

My complaints (if you can call them that) would be the general app quality on various platforms, and how much better Telegram feels. I'm a user that also enjoys all the stupid features that non-encrypted platforms have easier times adding. Gifs, stickers, drawing, reactions, /shrug - nothing necessary, but still.

So yea, functionally Signal works for me and my small group without much issue. It just doesn't have many Bells/Whistles.

Time for Matrix to brag about multiple home servers!

I can't say I'm surprised.... anyone on Signal (who gave the app access to their contacts) has seen a MASSIVE influx of new uers, and it's not like Signal is running in AWS and can just scale up more EC2 instances. This may be an issue for the next month or more as hundreds -- if not thousands -- of new servers can be added to the back end.

Recently saw an influx of messages from signal: "* is now on Signal!"

And yes, it's down here in Toronto-Hamilton metro, Canada as well.

https://status.signal.org says "Up and running"

Edit: Downdetector says its down https://downdetector.com/status/signal/, Twitter also has issues.

Now the status page says: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties. We are working hard to restore service as quickly as possible.

@ 2021-01-15T16:28:58.611Z

It's sad to happen now, but I'm so glad to see the sudden interest for Signal :)

Good luck to the engineers at Signal! <3

It has been down for roughly 90 minutes at my end. Previous thread - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25792136

Yes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25791730

Yes, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25792396

I don't have (and don't want) a cellphone. Is there a way for me to use signal? Maybe something that relays SMS?

I have to use Whatsapp to talk to people in a certain group. I use an old Android 6 phone with a prepaid SIM bought just for this single purpose, setup with a burner Google account. I only turn this phone on when I need to catch up or talk to them. It's really REALLY cheap and it works.

You can do the same for Signal.

Family and friends have starting using it as the main messaging app the past 3 months. Definitely growing.

Sods law, been setting up the matrix bridge, and wondered why I couldn't get anything to authenticate!

They went from 10 million users to 50 million users virtually overnight.

I think these kind of issues are understandable.

Is there a way to be less centralised? So that it can't go down because a central server does?

Consider Matrix instead of Signal.

I would love to. It’s just impractical to onboard my friends.

The Element sign-on workflows have been getting better and better, do note.

But, I think the current exodus will be good for Matrix too in the long term. The big steps is getting people off the megacorps for communication. After that, things will work out.

Isn't matrix just federated? (but still centralized).

Difference being like email. Gmail (or your own matrix server) might go down, but the overall email ecosystem wouldn't.

Federation is enough to avoid single point of failure.

but If on gmail and you are elsewhere, you still cant email me or vice versa.

These are anti-monopolistic practices by Google and should be illegal.

ok, if Im on protonmail and that is down, you still cant email me and vice versa if you are on yahoo mail. Is protonmail monopolistic too ?

I thought you were speaking about Google blocking other domains without a reason. If your domain is offline, then it's your problem. What's the point?

As I understand it, that's part of what makes Session an interesting fork of Signal: not only distributed/federated message relay backbone, but implements elements of Tor to hide your IP from receivers (of course if you click on a beacon link that destroys the IP hiding, but I digress).

There's always a way, it's just that Moxie (lead developer) is against it. His blog post from 2016 about the topic: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

Signal is awesome. Hoping the $5 donation I made today makes this 503 error go away

East Coast US and I'm experiencing 502 Bad Gateway errors.

Italy: signal is down right now @ 2021-01-15T16:25:49.988Z

Down for friends and I in the UK.

well it was fun while it lasted

Reply on news.ycombinator.com