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Musk Escalates Messaging Fight, Touts X Chat as Encrypted Alternative After AWS Outage

The dispute now centers on how users can verify encryption rather than on any proven breach.

Overview

  • An AWS failure in Northern Virginia tied to DynamoDB and DNS temporarily knocked some Signal users offline, according to the company.
  • Elon Musk said he no longer trusts Signal and promoted X Chat, later asserting that X messages are fully encrypted with no AWS dependencies or advertising hooks.
  • Signal’s president defended the app’s end-to-end encryption model and noted that Signal does not hold users’ encryption keys.
  • X labels X Chat as beta and it is not open source, limiting third‑party audits, while security researchers emphasize the need for open code and verifiable builds for trust.
  • Developers flagged longstanding reproducible‑build gaps for Signal’s Android app and noted app‑store distribution makes independently matching deployed code to published source more difficult.