Signal is one of the secured instant messaging apps that seems to have benefitted due to the latest privacy policy controversy by WhatsApp. With concerns and confusion over the policy, millions of users opted to leave WhatsApp and signed in to the secure service that saw a sudden surge of users. However, it seems like the service could not deal with the sudden rush and faced a day long outage. Some of the recent reports say that the service has been restored and Signal said that they could do so due to the ‘expanded capacity’.
Signal might have been restored, but has warned that the outage might have led to some errors like missed messages. The company has assured that they will soon be releasing some updates that would help to solve the problem. As to the number of new users added to Signal, the company has not confirmed any figure. But Apptopia while talking to a leading daily said that 1.3 million new sign-ups were noticed on January 11, 2021 alone.
Not just Signal, even Telegram has also got its benefits due to the WhatsApp policy issue. It has managed to add 25 million new users in just three days. Meanwhile WhatsApp continues its fight to clarify that the exodus of the users from WhatsApp is due to the confusion and has also insisted that it cannot read the messages. But by that time the damage has been done and a number of people were convinced that WhatsApp would be sharing the chats with its parent company Facebook for business purpose.
An outage issue with Signal has hinted that the demand for the service continues to remain high. As of December 2020, the company had 20 million active users while WhatsApp had more than 2 billion total users last February. One has to wait and watch if WhatsApp will manage to win its users back to its platform.
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