The popularity of the Signal messenger has increased dramatically after an unexpected scandal involving officials from Donald Trump's administration, TechCrunch reports.
On Monday, The Atlantic reported that senior officials — including Vice President J.D. Vance and Defense Secretary Peter Haggett — were using a Signal group chat to coordinate a planned military strike on Houthi forces in Yemen. The error accidentally added The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to the chat, who gained access to the conversation and later released its contents.
Despite the leak, the Signal app itself worked properly — a human error, not a technical glitch. However, the incident has sparked a wave of interest in Signal, known for its end-to-end encryption and privacy protections.
According to data from analytics company Appfigures, on Monday, the number of downloads of Signal on iOS and Google Play increased by 28% worldwide compared to the average for the past 30 days. In the United States, the increase was 45%. Interestingly, the growth in popularity of the messenger in Yemen, the country on whose territory the attack was carried out, was not much less — 42%. In the Yemeni App Store, the application rose from 50th to 9th place in the social networking category in just one day.
Signal has not yet commented publicly on the situation. Meanwhile, the US government has launched an investigation into the incident, which has revealed details about the timing of the attack, the types of weapons and the aircraft involved in messages that were not intended to be made public.