Signal and Telegram messaging services offline for some hours

For some hours users of the popular encrypted messaging services Signal and Telegram have been reporting problems accessing the services.

It’s unclear whether the outages are connected to each other, or what the reason for the services being offline might be. Until either service shares details, it’s just speculation whether the secure messaging services have been successfully targeted with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, for instance.

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What we do know is that there are certainly a number of forces out there who take a dim view of secure, encrypted messaging services and would like to see them disrupted.

Telegram posted on Twitter, apologising to users affected in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.

Some of our users in Europe and the MENA region are currently experiencing connection issues. Please hang on, we have all hands on deck to bring you back soon!

— Telegram Messenger (@telegram) March 5, 2018

It appears that both services are now beginning to come back online, although some users are still reporting problems connecting.

Now might be a good time to remind everyone of three principles that are essential to information security: Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability (also known by the rather natty three letter acronym of CIA).

Many internet users use Signal and Telegram because of the benefits they can bring in terms of confidentiality and integrity, but on this particular occasion the utilities are useless without also being actually available.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.