As of today signal has been down for more than a day.

New users signing up to use your service is always exciting. A product you have been building for a few years now gets in the spotlight. I am happy for signal and the movement they are working towards—privacy matters.

If I had to choose between a gradual increase in traffic and sudden user growth, I would always prefer the gradual increase. As a software developer and someone who has spent a lot of time learning about servers, load balancers, databases and provisioning servers, handling large user traffic require a lot of rework in building the software architecture. A team of engineers working to ensure that traffic and data are split/read from multiple channels is a project worth spending a few months/years on.

It’s disappointing for the users though, a service they were looking forward to using is suddenly unavailable vs a service they have been relying on which continues to be available. Do you switch back to the original service or continue to wait for the new service to be available? When it comes to the instant messaging platform, I would assume very few would choose to stay.

I hope that signal gets back online soon and is ready for the next wave of traffic, coming their way. It’s a good service from a nonprofit organisation. I like the UI and their focus on privacy. I, for one, will continue to move more conversations to signal slowly.