The massive influx of new users has caused technical difficulties for the operators of the Signal messenger. This emerges from a series of tweets, and quite a few (new) users of the messenger will be able to understand this themselves. A few hours ago it finally said on Twitter: “Signal is back!”

Signal was initially confirmed on Friday “technical difficulties”, the service should be restored as soon as possible. Yesterday, Saturday, it was said that Signal would also bring additional capacities online as soon as possible in order to be able to handle the data traffic.

Error messages Now the service has been restored, but as a side effect of the server failures, users can see an error message: “invalid encrypted message”. Signal assures that the chats are still safe, but users may not have received a message from a contact. A future update of the app should fix the problem.

If you get the error message on Android, tap on the menu at the top right of the app and then on “Secure Session reset to default”. On iOS, click on the “Reset session” button under “Received message was not synchronized”.

At the moment, many smartphone users are switching from WhatsApp to Signal because the service enforces consent to its new privacy policy, which states that data will be passed on to other Facebook services. The possibility of passing on applies with the restriction that these may not be used for advertising, but for analysis purposes. WhatsApp originally gave its users the ultimatum to agree to the new terms of use by February 8, but the Facebook subsidiary has now postponed the date. (anw)