I hate how Signal went down because of this... Wish it wasn't so centralised.
this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2025
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My friend messaged me on Signal asking if Instructure (runs on AWS) was down. I got the message. That being said, it's scary that Signal's backbone depends on AWS
Why is this scary? That's what e2ee is for, so that no one besides your recipient can view the contents of a message. It does not matter which server is used. If anything for a service like Signal, you want a server with high availability like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud or Cloudflare.
Scared because it's centralized. If Amazon decides that it wants to shut Signal down, they can. Nobody can spin up a Signal instance and help out.
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I have been able to use Signal like any other day. I haven’t seen any disruption in sending or receiving.
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Why do we place so much reliance on one mega company? This level of importance. It should be seized by the government.
It should be seized by the ~~government~~ people and mercilessly decentralized.
Agreed same for Facebook then call it Readabook
Agree
Why do we place so much reliance on one mega company? This level of importance.
Because it's cheaper and (in broad terms) more reliable than everybody having a data centre.
It should be seized by the government.
Oh yeah, what could possibly go wrong if the US government owned Amazon!
So, you changed one cloud provider to another...
But let me rephrase: cloud can be significantly cheaper - if you know what you're doing and what you're putting on the cloud.
I've been to data centres that cost as much as a decade of cloud hosting the service they were supporting (and that's without operational costs).
Cloud is especially great for small businesses where you have two alternative options: either build your own data centre which you absolutely cannot afford (or risk making it barely operational and unreliable) or host your company at someone else's DC - which is what cloud is, but worse (because nobody can set up so much resiliency and have so many DC techs/admins as Microsoft or Amazon).
There absolutely are situations where self-hosting is preferable, and even cheaper, but wondering "why do we place so much reliance" on cloud service providers just shows that people have no clue what cloud actually offers.
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AWS aggressively pursues high priced and years-long spending commitments with large customers, and they incentivize it with huge discounts for doing so.
And when AWS does this they intentionally incentivize these large customers to migrate existing workloads away from other cloud service providers as well, going so far as to offer assistance in doing so.
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Do you really want someone like the magahats having control over something like that?
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according to that page the issue stemmed from an underlying system responsible for health checks in load balancing servers.
how the hell do you fuck up a health check config that bad? that's like messing up smartd.conf and taking your system offline somehow
Well, you see, the mistake you are making is believing a single thing the stupid AWS status board says. It is always fucking lying, sometimes in new and creative ways.
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This kind of shit will only increase as more of these companies believe they can vibe-code their way out of paying software devs what they are worth.
that is an understatement 😂
Good
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