Signal president Meredith Whittaker fired back at critics questioning the encrypted messenger's reliance on Amazon Web Services, arguing that cloud infrastructure concentration leaves companies with no realistic alternatives. Her defense comes after last week's major AWS outage knocked Signal offline alongside dozens of other services.
Signal president Meredith Whittaker just delivered a reality check about cloud infrastructure that many tech users didn't want to hear. After Elon Musk and others criticized Signal's dependence on Amazon Web Services following last week's outage, Whittaker took to Bluesky with a blunt assessment: there simply aren't viable alternatives.
"The problem here is not that Signal 'chose' to run on AWS," Whittaker wrote in a detailed thread. "The problem is the concentration of power in the infrastructure space that means there isn't really another choice: the entire stack, practically speaking, is owned by 3-4 players."
The revelation caught many Signal users off guard, but Whittaker says that surprise is part of the problem. The number of people who didn't realize Signal uses AWS is "concerning," she argues, because it shows how little awareness exists around cloud infrastructure concentration. When your encrypted messages depend on the same servers powering Alexa devices and Fortnite, that's not Signal's fault - it's the inevitable result of decades of infrastructure consolidation.
The technical reality backs up Whittaker's argument. Running a platform that handles millions of concurrent audio and video calls requires what she calls "a pre-built, planet-spanning network of compute, storage and edge presence that requires constant maintenance, significant electricity and persistent attention and monitoring." Building that from scratch would cost billions, putting it beyond reach for most companies.
That leaves Signal with three realistic options: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud. The choice between tech giants isn't really a choice at all when you need global scale and sub-second latency for real-time communications.
Whittaker emphasized that Signal only "partly" runs on AWS and uses end-to-end encryption to ensure neither Signal nor Amazon can access user conversations. But that technical safeguard doesn't solve the broader infrastructure dependency that became painfully obvious when AWS went down.
The outage wasn't just a Signal problem. It knocked out Starbucks mobile orders, Epic Games Store downloads, Ring doorbells, Snapchat features, and even . When a single cloud provider can disrupt everything from coffee orders to sleep quality, the infrastructure concentration problem extends far beyond messaging apps.
