Elon Musk once again espoused the virtues of his social media platform X as most popular apps faced downtime due to an Amazon Web Services tech issue. Musk highlighted that X was unaffected by the disruption because it doesn’t have a dependency on Amazon’s cloud service.
In a post on X urging users to switch to X chat, Musk wrote, “The messages are fully encrypted with no advertising hooks or strange “AWS dependencies” such that I can’t read your messages even if someone put a gun to my head. You can also do file transfers and audio/video calls.”
Musk also wasn’t too happy with the privacy-focused personal messaging app Signal, which had touted itself as the much-needed alternative to WhatsApp in the last few years. The app also faced downtime due to the AWS outage.
’I don’t trust Signal anymore,’ Musk wrote, adding, ‘𝕏 Chat, enabled from the left menu, is better than Signal.’
While Musk has been freely poking fun at other companies over the AWS outage, his own platform (X) has faced an unprecedented number of technical glitches and outages since he took over in late 2022 and fired 80% of the company’s staff.
His other companies haven’t exactly been exempt from technical issues either. Just last month, Musk’s Starlink faced a global outage that affected thousands of users across North America, Europe, and Asia.
AWS says it’s fixed the underlying cause behind the outage:
AWS has said that it has fixed the underlying issues behind the outage but it could still take some time for things to come back to normal. Some platforms like Perplexity are back to normal while others such as Snapchat are facing a renewed surge in outage reports on Downdetector, suggesting all may not be right just yet.
Government Gateway services (including HMRC)
