Trust & Safety

How Signal handles failures

Failures are surfaced, never hidden: transient errors retry with backoff, permanent ones are marked failed with a reason, and real data is never overwritten.

Last updated June 14, 2026

Signal treats failure as a first-class state. A transient error retries with backoff; a permanent one is marked failed with a recorded reason and surfaced to you. Nothing fails silently.

The same honesty applies to metrics: if a metrics refresh fails, Signal keeps the last verified numbers and records the error rather than overwriting real data with blanks.