End-to-end encrypted messaging platform Signal suffered a global outage on Friday night, following unspecified “technical difficulties”. This came just days after the messaging app saw a huge influx of people migrating to the service from WhatsApp, following the latter’s somewhat concerning privacy policy updates. On Friday night, MediaNama tried sending some messages on the platform, but delivery of these messages failed. The app also showed a notification saying that “Signal is experiencing technical difficulties. We are working hard to restore service as quickly as possible”. Messages started getting delivered at around 10:30 AM on Saturday for some users. However, these results weren't uniform. Some features seemed to be working for some users, while for others, message delivery was still failing at the time of publishing. For instance, some users weren’t seeing read receipts even after the recipient had read the message. [caption id="attachment_127784" align="aligncenter" width="296"] Since this morning, some messages failed to send, while some were delivered without updating read receipts[/caption] “We have been adding new servers and extra capacity at a record pace every single day this week nonstop, but today exceeded even our most optimistic projections,” Signal tweeted on Friday, during the outage. https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1350118809860886528 Signal had, earlier this week, trumped WhatsApp to become the most downloaded free app on both the App Store and the Play Store in India, as updates to WhatsApp’s privacy policy had left many a users concerned about their data being potentially shared with parent company Facebook. The updates, which are mandatory for users…
