Slack serves up out-of-order messages, shaky comms as world goes back to work

Messaging platform Slack is first out of the gates of 2021 with a good, old fashioned TITSUP*. 4 January was the first working day of 2021 for many, but as the clock passed the 15:00 UTC mark, and much of the US began to ruefully turn off their out-of-office notifications and stare blearily at inboxes rammed full of a festive …

[Anonymous Coward]

What a piece of crap

It does not even bother to show an error message if you're already with an open session

I only went aware of the outage because a coworker emailed me saying it was down, despite me seeing the chat window as usual

It's nice to see that if I were to ask first instead of him, I'd be in the false impression he was ignoring me

How I miss the times when we had an in-house Jabber server for internal comms...

AC because I'm supposed to be working right now

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: What a piece of crap

Downvoted for suggesting Jabber was good.

[juice]

A hunk of junk...

> The previous emission from the Slack support team back on 23 November exclaimed: "Good news! The issues with degraded performance are no longer impacting customers."

Throughout December, it's been problematic on mobile devices, with channels loading incredibly slowly, if at all. There were also issues with sending messages - again, if you typed it and waited long enough, it'd eventually get sent, though you'd generally then have to force-quit the app and reload to send another.

Things seemed better post-Xmas on the mobile front - channels were loading and updating, and I was able to send messages. But then around midday, I tried to have a voice chat with a colleague, Only for it to complain that not only was Slack waiting for them to connect, but at the same time, it was also waiting for me to connect. Similar when I gave up and they tried to call me.

And now it's melted down altogether [*].

For now, we've fallen back to Google Hangouts (anyone remember that?) ; given that lockdown looks to be continuing for the foreseeable future, I suspect a lot of people will be looking at alternative platforms...

[*] as of ~5pm UK time, it seems to be lurching back into life, though it's taking 20-30 seconds for messages to be sent. Which isn't too far from the behaviour we saw on mobile devices during December...

[shah27]

Slack is doing a good job pushing people over to MS Teams

Slack services have been rather poor lately. At work we've been primarily using slack but more and more people are shifting over to Teams now. Today we had everyone working on Teams because slack just died on everyone.

If slack keeps this up there will be little reason to stick with slack in the future and soon someone at accounting will decide to save money and drop slack.

[yoganmahew]

Re: Slack is doing a good job pushing people over to MS Teams

Teams has been slooooooooooooooooow today too. Though still up.

[Anonymous Coward]

i truly hate slack

we have 3 IM tools here

Slack,

Google Chat

M$ Teams

We also have zoom for meetings too.

Slack is my least favourite but the business is determined to have its techies use that. We have to authenticate to it daily, problem is when i log in its logged in and updates, then 24hrs from yesterday it isn't logged in but doesn't tell mean hour later i'm pinged on Google chat asking why i'm not replying on slack & its because i never got the message. clicking about in slack everything looks ok, i can read messages, synced before the 24hrs was up, in the various channels and even create new messages, a tell tell sign is a few mins after sending a message i get a time out.

the only thing more infuriating than slack is visual studio code failing to connect to my GIT because i changed my AD password & VSC not offering for me to update its cached password or just offering to use single sign on or my AD token.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: i truly hate slack

I have teams way more.

[Anonymous Coward]

Glorified IRC ...

... worth USD $28 BEEELION. In Marc Benioff's mind. Just as reliable as IRC too.

I sense a Larry Envy Syndrome developing.

[Joel 1]

YMMV

Wide ranging differences in opinion...

At work have to use Slack, Teams, and also Zoom on occasion.

Teams seems dismal for chat and keeping up with what's happening in wide range of differing conversations. Would hate to have any sorts of alert notifications coming through Teams.

Slack has been working much better overall, particularly in a distributed WFH setup as we are currently in. Mind you, it could be related to the sorts of conversations that happen in each option. Working in Teams during the outage has been painful, but again, might be because we are trying some of the conversations that would normally happen under Slack.

One of the other painful bits around Teams is that it is tied in to the Office365 authentication, which gets painful when you have multiple clients with different domains that want you to authenticate to different Office365 accounts. I might be using it wrong, but it doesn't seem obvious to manage the differing authentications as easily as Slack workspaces.

Still, someone pays some money and you get less choice...

[Ima Ballsy]

Is it me or ....

is it that that slack, teams, et all, just seem to be prettyfied version of IRC, with a GUI interface ?

[Pascal Monett]

Re: Is it me or ....

And a badly programmed backend.

[Anonymous Coward]

Agile millennial coding hits production

^ the full explanation.

[Anonymous Coward]

Meanwhile, email is installed on every PC in every company and continues to work just fine.

[Anonymous Coward]

And doesn’t care what your client interface or backend server is. They all talk the same lingo.

[IGnatius T Foobar !]

And doesn’t care what your client interface or backend server is. They all talk the same lingo.

Funny thing about that, eh? Imagine if email had been invented in the 21st century when the current crop of tech behemoths were in charge. You'd only be able to send email to people on the same email provider as you.

The solution to inter-system messaging exists (XMPP S2S mode). But the behemoths refuse to enable it because they love keeping you locked into their system. Google even had it working for a few years and then they turned it off. Right bastards they all are.

[Oh Matron!]

<Bob Hoskins Voice> It's good to talk </Bob Hoskins>

Something we frequently forget.

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this article paid for by MS?

Teams does out of order messages every day. Late messages, with notifications arriving hours earlier, slow scrolling up (like Slack, it loads scrolled messages in on demand, but it's so slow - unlike Slack - that scrolling in Teams is essentially useless), just terrible.

And yet we don't see much reporting on all of that.