SignalGate Is Driving the Most US Downloads of Signal Ever

WIRED

27-03-2025

Mar 27, 2025 2:31 PM Scandal surrounding the Trump administration's Signal group chat has led to a landmark week for the encrypted messaging app's adoption—its 'largest US growth moment by a massive margin.' Photo-Illustration:SignalGate, as it's come to be called, may be the biggest scandal to hit the Trump administration in its first months in power. But it's been great for Signal.
Since the news broke on Monday that senior Trump administration cabinet members accidentally included the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic in a group chat on the Signal encrypted messaging platform where the officials were making secret plans to bomb Yemen, the ensuing news cycle and the constant mentions of Signal have led to the encrypted messaging platform doubling its usual rate of new downloads, the non-profit organization that runs Signal tells WIRED. Given that 2025 so far has already been a 'banner year' for Signal's growth, according to Signal's leadership, that makes this week the single biggest bump in US adoption of the app in Signal's nearly 11 years of existence.
'In Signal's history, this is the largest US-growth moment by a massive margin,' says Jun Harada, Signal's head of growth and partnerships. 'It's mind-blowing, even on our side.'
Harada declined to give absolute numbers for Signal's user growth beyond saying that its total downloads are in the 'hundreds of millions,' which has been the case for several years. But he said that the week's rate of adoption has been twice that of a typical week for 2025, which in turn was twice that of a typical week the same time last year. 'It happened immediately' after the Atlantic broke the story of Signal's use in the Yemeni bombing, Harada says. 'And it's been sustained. We've been maintaining that rate every day.'
In Signal's history, the only comparable spike in adoption occurred when WhatsApp changed its privacy policy in 2021, Harada says, leading to millions of users abandoning that communications app. But that incident mostly brought non-Americans to Signal, unlike the current, US-focused SignalGate bump.
Numbers from the market intelligence firm Sensor Tower largely align with Signal's own analysis of that growth: The company says that Signal downloads in the US increased 105 percent compared to the prior week—and 150 percent compared to an average week in 2024. Outside of the US, Sensor Tower saw only a 21 percent increase in Signal downloads compared to the prior week.
The Atlantic's revelation on Monday that secretary of defense Pete Hegseth, director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, national security adviser Michael Waltz, vice president JD Vance, and other Trump administration officials used a Signal group chat to plan an airstrike against Houthi rebels in Yemen—and that Waltz accidentally added Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg to that group in a shocking breach of confidentiality—has raised serious questions about the security practices of the Trump administration that are still resonating days later.
The scandal has called into question whether the executive branch officials were planning the airstrike using vulnerable non-approved or even personal devices rather than the secure machines intended for classified conversations. Screenshots of the group chat published by The Atlantic on Wednesday indicate the officials were using Signal's disappearing messages feature to delete their communications, potentially in violation of US record retention laws.
The incident has raised sometimes-misguided questions, too, about whether Signal itself is to blame for the breach—including from President Trump, who suggested in comments on Wednesday that Signal might be 'defective"—despite many cybersecurity and encryption experts' recommendation of Signal as the best end-to-end encrypted messaging tool freely available to the public. 'You use Signal, we use Signal, everyone uses Signal,' Trump told reporters, 'but it could be a defective platform.'
Signal's Harada declined to respond to Trump's 'defective' comment, and pointed to Signal's previous statements that it has yet to see any evidence of any vulnerability in the app, much less one that has anything to do with Jeffrey Goldberg being accidentally added to a White House group chat.
But Harada noted that the overall attention to Signal—even the president himself saying that 'everyone uses Signal' in the Oval Office—is an example of the kind of visibility it's never had before. 'All awareness for Signal is a net positive. The interest in Signal continues to be at an all-time high,' Harada says.
'I don't think my phone has ever buzzed this much, from people from every walk of life. People are learning about Signal who maybe have never even heard about or considered encrypted messaging before.' Harada also pointed to a report that Google searches for Signal were up more than 1,000 percent.
Harada says that Signal was already seeing a significant uptick in adoption in the first few months of 2025. He attributes that growth partly to increasing general interest in privacy among consumers and partly to the breach of nine US telecoms by China's Salt Typhoon hacker group, which led to the hackers accessing some targets' real-time calls and texts. Federal officials at the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency responded to those breaches by publicly recommending that Americans use encrypted messaging and calling applications.
But all of that has been dwarfed by the attention and interest Signal has received in the last week. As messy as SignalGate may be, Harada says, it's made Signal a household name like never before. 'To have this kind of mainstream moment is massive,' he says. 'I believe it's a sea change for private encrypted messaging for the US and the world.'