I think it was Thursday when Signal became the most popular download on both Android & Apple app stores. The Android userbase jumped from 10m to 50m in 24 hours & kept on climbing. I'm on the beta so can't see the production app figures right now but they're bound to be a massive increase again. I don't have iOS numbers either but they won't be much different.

Signal own their infrastructure, so they don't have the luxury of elastic Azure resource or spinning up another AWS instance - they use metal servers & suddenly had to build, test & deploy while their network was stressed like never before.

In my 7 years using Signal (& predecessor TextSecure), this has been only the second network failure to affect me. Considering the benefits that Signal Private Messenger provides, I'm quite ok with the occasional day off for their system.

What I found repulsive was the army of professional shills that jumped on social media, sh*tposting in an attempt to halt the mass migration from WhatsApp. Account after account was complaining about every little feature or function possible - often incorrectly & creating a fake news storm of misinformation.

I'd never come across anyone questioning the Signal funding model before - until today. It's a transparent model, there's nothing hidden but the army of sh*tposters hired by Facebook kept on throwing doubt anywhere they possibly could. I went as far as asking one non-Signal user whether he was paid to be such a dickhead, or did he do it for free?

Whinging & whining over available interface colours, wallpaper, timestamps, stickers - on & on & on. The vast majority of it, I'm confident was paid posting as Facebook tries desperately to retain the 2bn userbase of WA.

Signal is back online, although a little patchy right now. WhatsApp founder & Signal Foundation chairman, the billionaire Brian Acton has said that he will make sure that Signal survives. He's put $US150m in so far. Signal will survive & will transition successfully from being the best small privacy-focussed messaging app to the best mass-appeal privacy-focussed messaging app.