The Facebook outage wasn’t the first time people decided to see what Signal was all about.

(Signal itself went through an outage a week prior their Tweet continued, “ wish the best for the engineers working on bringing back service on other platforms #mondays.”) Until around noonish on Monday, WhatsApp was used by 2 billion people monthly, per Statista with the service down for much of the day, many people scrambled to get in touch with family and friends abroad, where WhatsApp is more commonly relied on than other messaging apps. 4, Signal Tweeted that signups for the app were “way up,” likely thanks to a widespread outage on Facebook-owned platforms like WhatsApp. Why Are So Many People Suddenly Using Signal?

Although the chat app has been around since 2014, you may not have heard of it until very recently - but you might be wondering what Signal is and how it works. While you’re probably familiar with WhatsApp and Facebook messenger, Signal has slowly been gaining steam as a messaging platform that takes privacy seriously. If you're more likely to use a messaging app than regular old texting, you have plenty of options to choose from: there's WhatsApp, Facebook messenger, Telegram, Signal, and plenty of others.

Signal app