Signal head Meredith Whittaker has responded to concerns about the encrypted messaging app’s use of Amazon Web Services, saying “there isn’t really another choice.”

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Signal president Meredith Whittaker defends the encrypted messenger's reliance on AWS following a major outage, explaining that AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud are the only viable options for providing global-scale, low-latency communication services. She emphasizes that the real issue isn't Signal's choice, but the concentration of power among 3-4 cloud infrastructure providers, making it practically impossible for services to avoid dependency on these hyperscalers without spending billions to build their own infrastructure.

‘There isn’t really another choice:’ Signal chief explains why the encrypted messenger relies on AWS

It’s not really the hyperscalers’ fault that building a global network of low latency servers is expensive and difficult, any more than it’s NASAs fault that your startup can’t send people to the Moon. Global infrastructure is a massive undertaking, and the hyperscalers can only offer it as a service because they amortize the upfront cost of building it across tens of thousands of business customers.
If you want robust, global, low-latency application serving at scale then you have two options:
<ol>
<li>Rent it from a hyperscaler, or</li>
<li>Build a billion-dollar infrastructure behemoth, at which point you are a hyperscaler</li>
</ol>
It’s not actually about concentration of power or monopolies or anything like that. It’s just that AWS is better at infrastructure than you are, offer resilient global services at a fraction of the cost of rolling your own unless you are near-FAANG scale yourself, and frankly you don’t have to like Jeff Bezos to run your business on AWS.

Does that mean Signal is no longer safe ?