Signal's president blames 'concentration of power' after AWS disruption fallout

The head of the messaging app Signal, which offers encrypted communication, has addressed complaints from users after the platform was affected by last week's global Amazon Web Services outage.

Signal prides itself on being “an independent non-profit” and has gained a loyal following. The app was in the spotlight this year after senior US officials inadvertently disclosed military plans to attack the Houthis in Yemen.

In a post on social media, Signal's president Meredith Whittaker said she was surprised to learn that so many users had not realised that the app relies partially on AWS technology.

“We use encryption to make sure no one but you – not AWS, not Signal, not anyone – can access your communications,” Ms Whittaker wrote.

“The question isn’t 'why does Signal use AWS?' It’s to look at the infrastructural requirements of any global, real-time, mass comms platform and ask how it is that we got to a place where there’s no realistic alternative to AWS and the other hyperscalers,” she said.

There's a “concentration of power” that enables only a few companies, which limits the choices available to smaller firms and significantly affects apps relying on data infrastructure, she added.

Ms Whittaker is not alone in her criticism of the Big Tech landscape, where a handful of companies exert enormous influence.

In the hours after last week's AWS outage, Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren was blunt in her assessment.

“If a company can break the entire internet, they are too big,” she said on X. “It's time to break up Big Tech.”

That post, however, came under criticism in the form of a community note and was condemned by some users who said that AWS is not a monopoly, but rather, “represents 30 per cent of the web”.

“Senator Warren also overlooks the fact that many providers went down because their services relied on a single AWS region, a malpractice that is not Amazon's fault,” the community note read.

Although the AWS disruption was largely resolved within 48 hours, the debate over how to prevent similar blackouts has shown no sign of slowing down.

For Signal, the entire incident is a symptom of a larger problem in the tech world.

“My silver lining hope is that AWS going down can be a learning moment, in which the risks of concentrating the nervous system of our world in the hands of a few players become very clear,” Ms Whittaker wrote.