Elon Musk says change your messenger
Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue
The world stopped yesterday, you may have noticed, when Amazon’s AWS cloud service dropped out of the sky. For many of the world’s internet users, it may have come as a shock just how dependent on U.S. cloud platforms we have now all become.
Not Elon Musk, of course. The Tesla, SpaceX and X supremo didn’t miss the opportunity to aim another strike at Signal, the uber-secure WhatsApp alternative that — we all now know — is as dependent on Amazon’s cloud as everyone else.
“I don’t trust Signal anymore,” Musk told his 228 million X followers, garnering 29 million views for a comment on a messaging platform with just 100 million users.
“This followed online comments from others as Signal dropped out of the sky. “PSA: we are aware that Signal is down for some people.” The platform’s boss had posted earlier, also on X. “This appears to be related to a major AWS outage. Stand by.”
Musk and Signal have sparred before. Once its biggest fan, Musk added his voice to those questioning Signal’s security credentials last year. The platform unsurprisingly pushed back hard and fast at any suggestions of vulnerabilities or compromises.
“Signal is trusted by the security and hacker community, and hundreds of millions of others,” Whittaker restated Monday, “BECAUSE they can examine it, and because on examination, it has shown to be robust, private, and secure – for over a decade.”
There’s something of a conflict behind this sparring, of course. “Try 𝕏 Chat,” Musk replied to his own post, “our new, encrypted communication system for texts, file transfers and audio/video calls. Enable from left menu.”
There was more of the same through Monday, with Musk reposting various promotional posts for his new X Chat. This is currently in beta and difficult to position against dedicated secure messengers such as Signal and — dare I say it — Meta’s WhatsApp, which uses Signal’s encryption and has also faced down Musk in the past.
There are no perfect messengers, but you should only use one that’s end-to-end encrypted. That primarily means WhatsApp, Signal, and either iMessage between iPhone users or Google Messages between Android users, but not cross-platform.
You can try X Chat if you want to, but it’s not yet one of my picks.
