back to article Work chat app Slack suffers services outage

Slack has fallen over for a subset of users, as the messaging platform admitted that "something's not quite right" with a number of its critical services. The outage coincides with the return to work from a three-day weekend for many of the company's US users. Signs that all was not running perfectly were posted on Down …

  1. Oh Matron!

    Disappointed.

    Normally El Reg is the bastion of great headlines...

    "Slack Slacking off" would have been apt. But no.

  2. AMBxx Silver badge
    Boffin

    Is Slack still a thing?

    Genuine question - are people still using Slack? I had a couple of customers working with it 3 years ago, nothing since.

    1. Jim Mitchell

      Re: Is Slack still a thing?

      Well, somebody is paying them $900 million a year for something.... I guess that doesn't actually mean people use it, though.

    2. Folda

      Re: Is Slack still a thing?

      What else is there? Teams is universally derided as being complete rubbish. Google are lacking features, although they are coming along. There are a plethora of less popular players, some of which are ok but lack integrations. Slack has its issues to be sure. But there isn't much real competition out there.

      1. AMBxx Silver badge

        Re: Is Slack still a thing?

        I just asked a question, no idea why so many downvotes - I'm just not seeing Slack any more.

        I work with multiple customers of all sizes, so I must be seeing a fairly representative sample of technology in use. I'm seeing Zoom and Teams. Most communication is by email. I've used Google hangouts (is that still the name?) once. Webex for large companies that haven't got round to using something better (PWC).

    3. Not Irrelevant

      Re: Is Slack still a thing?

      My employer is using Slack, the competitors don't have as good an API.

  3. Steve McGuinness

    Update : Now completely borked on all levels.

  4. D. Evans

    I sent the editorial team a wonderful screen shot of the Slack status page showing all services down, while at the bottom of the page it was showing 100% uptime for the current quarter. Slack-arsed would be more appropriate.

  5. juice

    It's been b0rked for the last 18 months...

    ... if not longer.

    For some reason, it seems significantly worse when you use the mobile app, as compared to the desktop/web version.

    During Christmas 2020, the app was effectively completely unusable: channels wouldn't load, messages wouldn't send - or would send, but still show up as a draft after being sent.

    And the same during Christmas 2021. Which makes me think that there's some sort of bottleneck in their "app" infrastructure, which has a bad tendency to show itself over the festive holidays when a lot of people switch over to using their mobile to access Slack.

    Certainly, things improved straight after the festive holidays for both 2020 and 2021.

    But over the last 2 weeks, the app's performance has been rapidly deteriorating again.

    And a messaging system where you can't reliably send or receive messages isn't really that useful...

  6. chololennon
    Happy

    I was happy today...

    The level of interruption that Slack generates in my daily workflow is astonishing (automatic channels, coworkers with silly questions, groups and groups and groups with the same people, etc, etc). I work remote so I have to be online, but Slack doesn't help here, it lacks of a simple busy status! (red icon, online and without alerts). I muted a lot of channels, but my boss complains all the time because I don't read messages on them. Nowadays it's more important to pay attention to Slack than to code a task. I have to tell you... I hate Slack... I was happy today.

    1. an it guy

      Re: I was happy today...

      try:

      1. Click profile icon

      2. move mouse to "pause notifications"

      3. Choose the duration

      4. Profit from the peace

      1. chololennon

        Re: I was happy today...

        @an it guy Thanks, I know that trick, the problem with it, is that I have to manually set the profile icon, and the tray notification icon (at least on Linux) still changes when a new message arrive.

  7. deadlockvictim

    oh dear

    People are able to concentrate on one thing for longer because the damned distracting thing is quiet.

    I can't say that I'm unhappy with this news.

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