Whittaker's comments weren't "made in the moment", they were posted in a big thread on Mastodon where she had all the time in the world to write them. But I guess you see that her comments are embarrassing to Signal, otherwise why invent excuses.
The Mozilla/Mitchell Baker vibes are strong here. It indicates a lot about Signal that its leadership doesn't understand who their competitors are (she thinks its Palantir?!), nor the basics of running a messaging service, nor even what her imagined competitors really do. X runs its own datacenters, Palantir is running in every cloud. They don't support her argument.
And I've worked on two web scale products with billions of users, both of them had 5 9's uptime. HN is full of people who have. This stuff isn't rocket science. The first reply on Mastodon points out that even Tor has better uptime than Signal.
She's saying this stuff because of her social background, not technical reality. It's just AWFL activist buzzphrases strung together, the sort of rhetoric that served her well in the past to climb the ladder. She's "concerned" and "surprised" that angry users don't understand the "power" of Amazon which "bodes poorly for our ability to craft reality-based strategies capable of contesting this concentration". She acknowledges "the high stakes use cases of many who rely on Signal" but has no interest in meeting those high stakes by driving the execution of an ordinary HA/multi-cloud/multi-region project, of the type that happens all the time in any bank. That's impossible, literally "there isn't really another choice", and also unnecessary because Signal is a mobile app so it depends on Android and that's the same thing as a depending on a cloud (what?). Her conclusion: "my silver lining hope is that AWS going down can be a learning moment", by which she means a learning moment FOR OTHER PEOPLE.
Can you imagine Mark Zuckerberg or Pavel Durov crying about Amazon and demanding that their outage be lesson to their users? It's unthinkable. They'd be in the conference rooms with the engineers figuring out how to ensure it never happens again. They might publish a public post mortem to build confidence. That's because they are engineers. Whittaker isn't so she publishes heart emojis and expresses concern at how little sympathy she's getting. No, this is 100% bad news for Signal. It's got totally feminized leadership that responds to the orgs own mistakes with demands for empathy, not fast paced engineering.
