"The list includes McDonald's, DisneyPlus, Snapchat, Signal, Roblox, Verizon, Fortnite, Venmo, Perplexity, Hulu, Duolingo, Perplexity, Reddit and Coinbase. Even Amazon.com was offline at one point, and some users have also reported that their Alexa smart speakers and Ring doorbells had stopped working.

Banks and even some government websites have been affected"

theregister.com/2025/10/20/ama…

#decentralisation #aws #amazon

Major AWS outage across US-East region breaks half the internet

: Amazon reports DNS issues hitting DynamoDB, leaving services from Roblox to McDonald's struggling

^{Dan Robinson (The Register)}

Disappointing to see nothing on Signal's blog as to the mass outage due to their dependence on AWS. Solely very specific social accounts. Their AWS use for serverside has not been a secret, but it would be good to have a detailed, transparent description of how far this relationship goes, if they have plans to add more resilience, decentering.

Their server side code is OSS yes, but just for audit purposes. To use it you'd need to rebuild the client apps, pointed to your instance.

With Signal proving to have no failure tolerance server side, we have effectively seen Amazon could switch off Signal. Not that they would necessarily do that, but it is an extraordinary power to hold, even a lever to wield.

I'm not slighting Signal here. I use it in my work. Family, friends all use it. Folk invested trust, & depend on it.

Signal have popularised E2EE chat, brought it to the masses (spurred Meta to Double Ratchet WhatsApp). A huge contrib

The Q is: what will Signal do now?