A few days after shooting in popularity on the shoulders of WhatsApp’s digital migration thanks to a new privacy policy change, Signal is down, after suffering a major outage that is affecting its services.

The privacy-focused messaging service had earlier this week reported that they had a 62-fold increase in downloads, leading to 17.8 million new downloads over the past seven days, pushing the total app downloads to over 50 Million on Android alone.

According to DownDetector, Signal has been down for a number of hours, with reports of the outage streaming in as early as 6 PM (EAT). As at the time of ging t press, we were yet to get any official communication from the company.

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The affected services include sending and receiving messages. Users can open the app, but they are greeted with the message, “Signal is experiencing technical difficulties. We are working hard to restore services as quickly as possible.”

As there is no official word on the cause of the outage, speculation is that the huge influx of new users has been too much for Signal to handle, but without any communication from the company, these claims remain just that. Interestingly though, Signal had announced and teased a number of new features including the addition of stickers as the platform worked to include features it was otherwise missing so as to retain the new users coming in to “check it out”.

We have confirmed that the outage is global and as this is a developing story, we shall update this article as we get more information.