Sign President Spars With Elon Musk Over Belief in Personal Messengers

On Monday, a major outage at Amazon Web Services affected numerous web sites and apps, together with end-to-end encrypted messenger Sign. In response, X Govt Chairman and Chief Technical Officer Elon Musk claimed that he now not trusts Sign. “I don’t belief Sign anymore,” Musk acknowledged, plainly.

To be clear, the centralized infrastructure upon which Sign depends doesn’t essentially put encrypted communications made by way of Sign in danger, as Sign doesn’t maintain the keys to the encrypted information held in that infrastructure.

PSA: we’re conscious that Sign is down for some folks. This seems to be associated to a significant AWS outage. Stand by.

— Meredith Whittaker (@mer__edith) October 20, 2025

Sign President Meredith Whittaker responded to Musk’s submit on X, noting, “Sign is trusted by the safety and hacker group, and a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands of others, BECAUSE they will look at it, and since on examination, it has proven to be strong, personal, and safe–for over a decade.”

In latest months, Musk has been selling using X Chat as a technique of safe, encrypted communications between its customers. Nonetheless, safety consultants have noted that any encrypted messaging app must be open supply whether it is to be trusted with safe communications, along with different issues. In any case, how is somebody alleged to know what the app is definitely doing if they can not have a look at the code?

Strive 𝕏 Chat, our new, encrypted communication system for texts, file transfers and audio/video calls.

Allow from left menu. https://t.co/HxVP7zQDej

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 20, 2025

X themselves label X Chat, which is meant to finally substitute the standard direct messaging system, as beta software program on their platform. There have been reports in 2018 that X (then referred to as Twitter) was testing end-to-end encryption; nevertheless, the function didn’t get an official help announcement until 2023. X has additionally stated they plan to finally make it simpler to confirm that their chat options are as secure and safe as they declare.

Jack Dorsey, who initially co-founded X as Twitter and led the corporate for years, was open to this transfer in direction of end-to-end encryption throughout his time as CEO. Extra not too long ago, Dorsey “vibe coded” a geographically-focused messaging app known as Bitchat over a weekend.

Bitchat gained notoriety through the latest overthrow of the Nepalese authorities because of the app’s mesh networking options that enable it to operate in localized areas with out web entry. An app with comparable options, referred to as FireChat, was used during the Hong Kong protests all the way in which again in 2014.

After all, Sign is just not excellent both and has acquired its personal fair proportion of criticisms over time. Sign’s reliance on telephone numbers was routinely introduced up as a nasty thought by safety researchers till the messaging app recently allowed users to sign up with just a username.

Notably, Whittaker acquired some pushback to her feedback at the moment relating to Sign’s openness and verifiability from a number of builders who’ve labored on Bitcoin. Peter Todd, who is maybe finest recognized for the accusation that he’s Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto in an HBO documentary launched earlier this yr, identified that the app shops on Android and iOS get in the way in which of customers having the ability to verify that the open-source code run on customers’ gadgets truly matches the code printed by Sign.

Moreover it has had reproducibility points for over a yr and the difficulty retains getting closed as a consequence of lack of curiosity in fixing https://t.co/487B9bhMUC@elonmusk please be certain X chat prioritizes reproducible builds

— Steve Lee (@moneyball) October 20, 2025

Todd has contributed to Bitcoin Core over time, which is Bitcoin node software program that has a strict adherence to enabling reproducible builds, which permit finish customers to confirm that an app is constructed from the identical open-source code that has been printed elsewhere. Steve Lee, who leads Bitcoin open-source growth grant supplier Spiral, additionally identified that there’s an open situation associated to reproducible builds for Sign on Android.

Clearly, Bitcoin purists, who discuss endlessly about the advantages of the community’s decentralization, even have an issue with Sign’s reliance on centralized infrastructure that led to this morning’s down time within the first place.

Whether or not you’re speaking about Bitcoin or personal messaging, there are oftentimes tradeoffs made when balancing excellent privateness and safety with constructing a user-friendly app that individuals will truly use. Sign remains to be the usual in relation to encrypted messaging, however extra competitors on this space can by no means damage, so long as it offers privateness that’s verifiably reliable.