CBC News: Amazon’s cloud services unit AWS was hit by an outage on Monday, causing connectivity issues for many companies around the world and disrupting services for several popular websites and apps including Fortnite and Snapchat. […]
CBC News: Messaging app Signal’s President Meredith Whittaker also confirmed on X that their platform was hit by the AWS outage as well.
I’m traveling and Signal is already restricted where I am and I was so frustrated yesterday as it wasn’t working properly even with all of Mullvad’s tech thrown at it.
Didn’t realize Signal was also impacted. This makes sense.
But to answer your question, it seems to be working today.
Thanks. Yeah, I realized yesterday how dependent on Signal I was. I love Signal, but the fact that I didn’t have a private alternative option to message my friends and family while it was down is annoying. Of course, I could have used WhatsApp or god forbid Tlg*am, but that could encourage the contacts I converted to Signal to text me there, and I don’t want that.
Having to convince people close to me to download a 2nd E2EE app as backup is just not practical. This incident incentivizes me even more to try OpenBubbles, given the number of people I know who use iPhone.
Your own server proxy via a VPS (that does not rely on any major or big tech cloud service) is the answer. Wish I knew how to make one. They say its relatively easy but not to me. I hope @jordan and/or @em can create some content on this for all who rely on PG for simple to understand reliable info. Perhaps a collaboration? Written piece by Em and an accompanying video by Jordan (or vice versa). Hope the PG team sees this and considers it.
New and unique content like that is why people become members so there are no downsides to this. Cost and time I feel are the only constraints (if that).
A VPS guide does sound interesting. One potential avenue of research would be selecting a reliable VPS provider in the first place. Always happy to help out with this for a potential knowledge base PR
PG doesn’t necessarily have to select the absolute best, reliable, most ethical, etc. of the VPS’s because things change in the tech space. So any decent ones with the addendum that showing that particular VPS does not equate an official recommendation by PG would I feel still be enough.
Anyways, I really really want this. I can move over all my family and friends (who are willing to) over to my private proxy. This would also help avoid and bypass pesky internet blocks on Signal.
Now all we need are the ELI5 instructions to make your own Signal proxy. Once I learn that, I can extrapolate that learning to self hosting other things on VPSs.
