“The question isn’t ‘why does Signal use AWS?’” Whittaker writes. “It’s to look at the infrastructural requirements of any global, real-time, mass comms platform and ask how it is that we got to a place where there’s no realistic alternative to AWS and the other hyperscalers.”
To me, this reads as sophistry.
What happened here is a predictable result of Signal's design. They chose to build a centralized messaging system. This made things significantly easier for them than a distributed design would have been, but it comes with drawbacks. Having single point of failure is one of them. (In this case, that single point is Amazon.)
Trying to direct the public's focus onto cloud providers instead of acknowledging this fundamental shortcoming in their design is, frankly, disingenuous. Especially coming from someone in Whittaker's position.
While we're at it, let's acknowledge that centralized design in messaging systems is problematic not just because of (un)reliability, as seen here. It also creates a single point of attack for any entity seeking to restrict, shut down, or track people's communications. End-to-end encryption cannot solve those problems.