from Hacker News

Signal was experiencing technical difficulties

by thsowers on 3/31/20, 5:05 PM with 57 comments

• by h4waii on 3/31/20, 5:57 PM

  What a horrible status page, for a project of 1 person or 1 million persons, this is slightly above useless.

  Stripe [0] and Segment [1] have pretty useful status pages, which provide, in my opinion, the real reason for a status page -- to confirm there isn't a problem on your end or that an issue you're facing is or isn't a problem with the service so you can escalate accordingly.

  0. https://status.stripe.com/

  1. https://status.segment.com/

• by gojomo on 3/31/20, 7:28 PM

  There's an interesting fork of Signal, called 'Session', that aims to remedy many of the flaws in Signal's infrastructure/strategic choices. It's young - needing a lot more analysis & track record before earning serious credibility – but you can check it out at: https://getsession.org/

  Some of its Signal-contrasting goals include:

  * no phone numbers needed

  * onion-routed messages

  * multi-device sync

  * no central point of failure

  I also don't see anything in Session's materials that they're placing Intel™ SGX™ at key points in mandatory introduction/contact-uploading/cloud-backup steps – as Signal likes to do.

• by ilikestuff42 on 3/31/20, 5:33 PM

  Explains why I was having issues this morning. Was receiving messages on the desktop app, but not my phone, and none of my messages where bring received regardless of where I sent them from.

  Oh well, had they're working on it.

• by BelleOfTheBall on 3/31/20, 5:38 PM

  I presume it might be them struggling to deal with increased traffic from the quarantined crowd? Although I'm not sure how many users Signal has now and how much of an increase it's experienced.

• by andrewxdiamond on 3/31/20, 6:24 PM

  Signal's quality issues are why I switched to telegram. The performance, quality, and UX are years ahead of Signal. Plus, I've never had a message drop on telegram, very much unlike Signal.

  The one drawback is chats aren't e2e encrypted by default, but there is an option to have "Secret Chats" which are e2e encrypted.

• by nikisweeting on 3/31/20, 6:11 PM

  Has it ever not been? I've been unable to receive messages on desktop for 6+ months. The mobile app constantly loses message history and fails to receive notifications as well.

  I've submitted multiple detailed support tickets with screenshots, steps to reproduce, etc, to no avail, never even got a response.

• by nimbius on 3/31/20, 5:41 PM

  this only serves to highlight how critical it is for signal to switch to a distributed design. Its a great technology, but worthless if regimes can just QoS it into oblivion or block it entirely.

• by generalpass on 3/31/20, 5:34 PM

  > Signal is up and running.

• by gojomo on 3/31/20, 7:13 PM

  For a tool that aspires to be critical privacy infrastructure, Signal is quite opaque in its operations.

• by armitron on 3/31/20, 5:33 PM

  Benefits of centralization.