Signal Back After 24 Hours of Outages Caused by Surging Traffic

'After experiencing technical difficulties Friday, the Signal messaging app appears to be back up and running,' reports the Verge:

The company tweeted Saturday night that it was 'back,' although added that some users may still see error messages in their chats. The company didn't explain what caused the outage.

For users still seeing error messages in their chats — which the company said was a 'side effect' of the outage that began around 11:30AM ET Friday — Signal tweeted that those messages do not affect security, rather that you may have missed a message from another user. This will be fixed in the next app updates, the company said...

During the outage, the Signal tweeted that it was 'working as quickly as possible to bring additional capacity online to handle peak traffic levels.'

A headline at Android Authority suggests a theory about what caused the outage: 'Mass exodus from WhatsApp causes Signal servers to buckle under pressure.'

'Although we aren't certain why this specific outage occurred,' they write, 'Signal has made it clear that it is seeing a huge influx of new users. The surge in adoption is due in no small part to people running away from WhatsApp after that Facebook-owned service updated its privacy policy.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.