Signal Messaging App Gets ‘Millions’ of New Users After Facebook Outage

Cross-platform messaging app, Signal, announced it added “millions of new people” on Monday, after the extended Facebook outage that shut down WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram.

“Signups are way up on Signal (welcome everyone!) We also know what it’s like to work through an outage, and wish the best for the engineers working on bringing back service on other platforms #mondays,” said the non-profit app on Monday.

“Millions of new people have joined Signal today and our messaging and calling have been up and running but some people aren’t seeing all of their contacts appear on Signal. We’re working hard to fix this up,” announced Signal on Monday, noting it was dealing with a surge of sign ups.

Signups are way up on Signal (welcome everyone!) We also know what it’s like to work through an outage, and wish the best for the engineers working on bringing back service on other platforms #mondays

— Signal (@signalapp) October 4, 2021

Signal is a private messaging app that works across all devices, with zero ads, as it is supported entirely by community donations.

As for what caused the Facebook outage? The social network says it learned, “configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”

Signal allows for encrypted messaging plus voice or video calls, while it also allows for disappearing messages and allows you to send any image, audio, video or file type to fellow contacts.

Click here to download Signal in the App Store.