Sign President Spars With Elon Musk Over Belief in Personal Messengers

On Monday, a major outage at Amazon Web Services affected a lot of 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 through Sign in danger, as Sign doesn’t maintain the keys to the encrypted knowledge 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 publish on X, noting, “Sign is trusted by the safety and hacker group, and lots of of thousands and thousands of others, BECAUSE they will study it, and since on examination, it has proven to be strong, non-public, and safe–for over a decade.”

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

Attempt 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 characteristic didn’t get an official help announcement until 2023. X has additionally mentioned they plan to finally make it simpler to confirm that their chat options are as protected 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 the 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 in the course of the latest overthrow of the Nepalese authorities as a result of 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 isn’t excellent both and has acquired its personal fair proportion of criticisms through the years. Sign’s reliance on telephone numbers was routinely introduced up as a nasty concept 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 as we speak concerning Sign’s openness and verifiability from a number of builders who’ve labored on Bitcoin. Peter Todd, who is maybe finest identified for the accusation that he’s Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto in an HBO documentary launched earlier this 12 months, 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’ units really matches the code revealed by Sign.

Moreover it has had reproducibility points for over a 12 months and the problem retains getting closed as a consequence of lack of curiosity in fixing https://t.co/487B9bhMUC@elonmusk please be sure X chat prioritizes reproducible builds

— Steve Lee (@moneyball) October 20, 2025

Todd has contributed to Bitcoin Core through the years, 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 revealed elsewhere. Steve Lee, who leads Bitcoin open-source improvement grant supplier Spiral, additionally identified that there’s an open difficulty associated to reproducible builds for Sign on Android.

Clearly, Bitcoin purists, who speak 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 non-public messaging, there are oftentimes tradeoffs made when balancing excellent privateness and safety with constructing a user-friendly app that individuals will really use. Sign remains to be the usual with regards to encrypted messaging, however extra competitors on this space can by no means harm, so long as it gives privateness that’s verifiably reliable.