Signal's president, Meredith Whittaker, addressed criticism regarding the app's reliance on Amazon Web Services (AWS) following a major outage that affected multiple services. She emphasized that the concentration of power among a few cloud providers leaves companies like Signal with little choice but to use them for global, reliable communication services. Whittaker hopes the outage will highlight the risks of such centralized infrastructure in the tech industry.
Meredith Whittaker discusses the surprising reaction of people learning that Signal operates partly on AWS, emphasizing the importance of encryption that ensures user communications remain private and inaccessible to anyone, including AWS and Signal itself. She expresses concern over the public's lack of understanding regarding this aspect of Signal's infrastructure.