On Monday, a major outage at Amazon Web Services affected a large number of websites and apps, including end-to-end encrypted messenger Signal. In response, X Executive Chairman and Chief Technical Officer Elon Musk claimed that he no longer trusts Signal. “I don’t trust Signal anymore,” Musk stated, plainly.
To be clear, the centralized infrastructure upon which Signal relies does not necessarily put encrypted communications made via Signal at risk, as Signal does not hold the keys to the encrypted data held in that infrastructure.
PSA: we are aware that Signal is down for some people. This appears to be related to a major AWS outage. Stand by. — Meredith Whittaker (@mer__edith) October 20, 2025
Signal President Meredith Whittaker responded to Musk’s post on X, noting, “Signal is trusted by the security and hacker community, and hundreds of millions of others, BECAUSE they can examine it, and because on examination, it has shown to be robust, private, and secure–for over a decade.”
Musk’s Promotion of X Chat
In recent months, Musk has been promoting the use of X Chat as a method of secure, encrypted communications between its users. However, security experts have noted that any encrypted messaging app should be open source if it is to be trusted with secure communications, in addition to other concerns. After all, how is someone supposed to know what the app is actually doing if they cannot look at the code?
Try 𝕏 Chat, our new, encrypted communication system for texts, file transfers and audio/video calls. Enable from left menu. https://t.co/HxVP7zQDej — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 20, 2025
X themselves label X Chat, which is intended to eventually replace the traditional direct messaging system, as beta software on their platform. There were reports in 2018 that X (then known as Twitter) was testing end-to-end encryption; however, the feature did not get an official support announcement until 2023. X has also said they plan to eventually make it easier to verify that their chat features are as safe and secure as they claim.
Jack Dorsey, who originally co-founded X as Twitter and led the company for years, was open to this move towards end-to-end encryption during his time as CEO. More recently, Dorsey “vibe coded” a geographically-focused messaging app called Bitchat over a weekend.
Bitchat gained notoriety during the recent overthrow of the Nepalese government due to the app’s mesh networking features that allow it to function in localized areas without internet access. An app with similar features, known as FireChat, was used during the Hong Kong protests all the way back in 2014.
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