Musk Exploits AWS Outage To Unfairly Slam Signal, Promote His Shittier Chat Software
If Elon Musk probably has a superpower, it isn't his engineering or business savvy. It's probably his rank opportunism. The latest case in point: this week saw a massive outage for Amazon Web Services (AWS) that managed to take many of your favorite websites and services offline. The outage also hampered the workflows of countless online businesses. The impact was fairly universal.
And, ever the opportunist, Musk was quick to leverage the outage to unfairly smear a potential competitor and promote his own, shittier alternative.
Amazon said the outage was caused by problems with an underlying subsystem that monitors the health of its network load balancers used to distribute traffic across several servers. The outrage resulted in all the usual conversations about whether it's a bad idea to have so much essential server operations under the control of one company, and how the internet isn't as resilient as we like to think.
Musk, however, took the opportunity to exploit the outage to criticize Signal over at his right wing propaganda and crypto grifter website:
Why would Musk do this? He's trying to promote his own, shittier encrypted chat software beta, the creatively named X Chat. X Chat is part of Musk's quest to turn what was once Twitter into an everything app," despite the fact he's shown little real indication he's innovative enough to actually make X useful for anything outside of sports chat and fighting with racist crypto grifter bots.
While Signal isn't perfect and certainly has some dependencies on centralized infrastructure, the AWS outage didn't create any specific risk issues related to encrypted Signal communications. Musk simply saw an opportunity to exploit the outage to market his barely-used beta software. Signal President Meredith Whittaker responded to Musk by noting that Signal was at least transparently open source:
But because every brain fart Elon Musk has somehow warrants its own clickbait news cycle, what's left of the U.S. press couldn't help but amplify Musk's criticism of Signal and parrot his attacks mindlessly:
Much like Trump, Musk's real skill set has absolutely nothing to do with engineering.
His real skill set revolves rank opportunism (like cozying up to talented engineers and taking singular credit for their work) and exploiting America's very broken press for attention and marketing. In this case, trying to convince people to migrate from a trusted, open source, secure messaging app to a closed source app run by an erratic white supremacist ideologically aligned with the planet's shittiest people.