- Elon Musk's tweet in May about Signal's vulnerabilities caused significant fallout for the app.
- Signal's president, Meredith Whittaker, refuted Musk's claims, calling them baseless.
- Criticism from Telegram's CEO and the hacker community added to Signal's security concerns.
In the virtual world, few things are as challenging as handling the fallout from a controversial tweet from Elon Musk.
In May, Musk tweeted that the encrypted messaging app Signal had "known vulnerabilities." Signal's president, Meredith Whittaker, told Wired she spent "two nights of me not sleeping, just dealing with Twitter stuff."
Musk had originally backed the app in 2021 with a direct, two-word tweet: "Use Signal."
"He's been a fan. So I don't know what changed," Whittaker said. "What I do know is that, as far as we know, the claim was completely baseless." She added that there was no "serious report" backing up Musk's claims.
Signal is considered more secure than most messaging apps because of "end-to-end encryption," which encodes a sender's message so that only the intended receiver's device can unlock it. The platform's code is also open-source, which the company said emphasizes its focus on privacy. "We work in the open, documenting our thinking and making our code open source and open to scrutiny—so you don't have to take our word for it," according to a blog post from Signal.
Musk's comments, however, came amid a swirl of criticism about the app. Around that time, Pavel Durov, the CEO of rival app Telegram, also criticized Signal, saying it was not a secure choice for private messaging and that "the US government spent $3M to build Signal's encryption."
According to Wired, there are also figures in the "hacker scene" suggesting better, more "obscure, ultra-secure" messaging platforms.
Whittaker rebuffed those claims, and told the outlet that "it's very disappointing to me to see that kind of discourse." For those who can't verify the validity of claims against Signal — who, Whittaker said, are 99% of its users — those kinds of comments can cause true security disruptions. "It's a life-or-death issue."