‘Signal’ restored after 24-hour outage

Signal has witnessed a surge in new users after its rival WhatsApp announced a new privacy policy update last week. (Photo: AFP)


Messaging app Signal said it has resolved technical issues which hampered its service globally over the past few days, but reports suggested that some were still experiencing error messages.

“Signal is back! Like an underdog going through a training montage, we’ve learned a lot since yesterday — and we did it together. Thanks to the millions of new Signal users around the world for your patience. Your capacity for understanding inspired us while we expanded capacity,” the company said in a tweet on Sunday.

Although some users may still see error messages in their chats.

Last week, users were unable to send messages, the messaging kept trying its best to revive the chats.

Signal didn’t explain what caused the outage. The company has offered two fixes if users want to clear the error messages manually.

On Android, if you see “Bad encrypted message,” tap the menu in the top-right & tap “Reset secure session”. In the iOS tap, the “Reset Session” button below “Received message was out of sync.”

The company said that the errors do not affect chat security and will be automatically fixed in the next app update.

In the past few days, Signal has witnessed a surge in new users after its rival WhatsApp announced a new privacy policy update last week.

Telegram, another free-to-use encrypted messaging app, also saw a jump in its user base.

In a recent blog post, WhatsApp said it has decided to defer the rollout of its new data privacy policy update to May 15.

“No one will have their account suspended or deleted on February 8. We’re also going to do a lot more to clear up the misinformation around how privacy and security work on WhatsApp. We’ll then go to people gradually to review the policy at their own pace before new business options are available on May 15,” it said.