TV Interview at Bloomberg Asharq: Interruption of Signal Services

The opening line of the TV presenter was: "Ayman has a nice smile, let us see if Telegram or Signal are behind that smile".

When she said that it cracked me up and I tried hard not to overly laugh on live air. I liked that the opening was a friendly opening, not a serious one, the way it usually is when the media is covering a certain topic.

The questions were about why the service of Signal was interrupted and if it was tied to millions of users joining the service in a short amount of time after many users added Signal to their messaging apps after the WhatsApp privacy discussion.

Cloud services can scale very quickly to accommodate user growth and usually are ahead of user growth with an additional growth buffer. For example, assume the user growth is 20% month-on-month, the servers, and the setup will likely be set up to handle 50% month-on-month growth. However, they are not set up to handle for example 300% sudden growth and there needs to be a technical adjustment period.

Adding servers and storage via the cloud is done VERY EASILY. I remember a time before cloud servers where we had to fly into the city where the colocation server is located, physically add servers within the freezing cold environment of the server location that is built for machines, not humans, do integrations to add one server at a time, etc. With cloud servers, you can add servers by software remotely and set it up within less than an hour.

In summary,

* Cloud services are the core of how Netflix, Signal, WhatsApp, and all large scale online services are able to accommodate user growth (with some outages here and there) by adding servers and storage space easily

* Ayman has a great smile ;)

Watch the interview here: https://www.instagram.com/p/CKRxhr8DTYV/