Signal Chief: Why We Must Use AWS for Encryption
▼ Summary
– Signal president Meredith Whittaker defended the app’s reliance on AWS, stating there was no realistic alternative due to the concentration of power among a few major cloud providers.
– Whittaker expressed concern that many people were unaware Signal uses AWS, indicating a lack of awareness about the highly concentrated cloud infrastructure industry.
– She explained that AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud are the only viable options for providing reliable global service without spending billions on custom infrastructure.
– Signal uses encryption to ensure neither Signal nor AWS can access user conversations, and the app only partly runs on AWS.
– The AWS outage affected numerous services beyond Signal, including Starbucks, Epic Games Store, and Ring doorbells, highlighting the risks of infrastructure concentration.
Following a significant service disruption at Amazon Web Services that impacted Signal and numerous other platforms, the encrypted messaging app’s leadership is clarifying its infrastructure strategy. Signal president Meredith Whittaker contends that the company’s reliance on major cloud providers like AWS stems from the extreme market concentration in global technology infrastructure. She argues the core issue isn’t Signal’s specific choice, but rather a landscape where only a handful of corporations control the foundational systems required for worldwide communication.
In a detailed discussion on Bluesky, Whittaker addressed criticism from figures like Elon Musk, who questioned Signal’s dependence on big tech. She expressed concern that many users were unaware Signal even operated on AWS, suggesting this reflects a broader lack of public understanding about the cloud industry’s consolidation. The critical question, according to Whittaker, is not why Signal uses AWS, but how the world arrived at a point where there are no realistic alternatives for running a global, real-time communications platform.
Whittaker detailed the immense technical demands of operating a service like Signal. Providing a low-latency platform capable of supporting millions of simultaneous audio and video calls requires a pre-existing, planet-spanning network of computing power, data storage, and edge servers. This infrastructure demands constant maintenance, enormous electricity, and persistent monitoring. Building such a system independently would require billions of dollars in investment, making established hyperscalers like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud the only viable options for delivering reliable service at a global scale.
She was quick to reassure users about Signal’s security model, emphasizing that the service only “partly” runs on AWS. The app’s end-to-end encryption ensures that neither Signal nor its infrastructure providers can access the content of user conversations. The recent outage highlighted how many essential services share this dependency; alongside Signal, the disruption affected Starbucks, the Epic Games Store, Ring doorbells, Snapchat, Alexa devices, and various smart home products.
Whittaker views the incident as a potential catalyst for awareness. She hopes the widespread disruption serves as a learning moment, making the risks of concentrating the world’s digital nervous system in the hands of a few powerful players starkly clear to the public and policymakers alike.
(Source: The Verge)
