Last week, the privacy-focused messaging service Signal was temporarily shut down when Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered a major outage. This led to criticism of Signal’s use of such a dominant provider as AWS.

Signal CEO Meredith Whittaker has now commented that Signal basically has no other choice.

“The problem is the concentration of power in the infrastructure space, which means there is effectively no real alternative: the entire stack is effectively owned by 3-4 players,” writes Meredith Whittaker on Bluesky.

She continues:

“The question isn’t ‘why is Signal using AWS?’ It’s about looking at the infrastructural requirements of any global, real-time mass communication platform and asking how it is that we have ended up in a situation where there is no realistic alternative to AWS and the other hyperscalers.”

[ Related reading: Post outage, AWS adds automated incident reporting to its CloudWatch service ]