
Signal was experiencing technical difficulties - thsowers
https://status.signal.org/
======
h4waii
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/](https://status.stripe.com/)

1\. [https://status.segment.com/](https://status.segment.com/)

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gojomo
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/](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.

~~~
Gaelan
I mean, SGX is strictly an improvement over the same protocol without SGX.

~~~
gojomo
If the protocol were designed to require an SGX-like component, sure, leaving
it out would be fatal. But not improved over alternative design choices!

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ilikestuff42
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.

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BelleOfTheBall
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.

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andrewxdiamond
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.

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nikisweeting
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.

~~~
prophesi
I've used it across three different mobile phones and countless desktop
devices over the years without any issues. Did you accidentally set the
messages to expire after a short time? Are you using more than one mobile
phone? I also recommend submitting an actual github issue to either their
Desktop or Android/iOS repo with those detailed instructions.

~~~
nikisweeting
Most definitely not using expiring messages, each message shows up as "Error
handling incoming message" instead of the message text, but otherwise looks
the same as a normal message.

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nimbius
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.

~~~
ajconway
Centralized services can experience outages, but federation does not
automatically solve all of the availability issues.

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generalpass
> Signal is up and running.

~~~
thsowers
Just updated the title, thanks!

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

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armitron
Benefits of centralization.

~~~
bitskits
Outages?

~~~
dijit
More like: "When it's down, it's just down for everyone and there's nothing
you can do"

If most messaging systems were IRC, XMPP or Matrix then and the status quo was
not that Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp were the most popular instant
messaging solutions, then Signal being so centralised would look quite odd and
we might have cause to criticise them.

The situation is not that, however we can still fault them for this.

