Welcome back to the virtual workplace … just kidding!
Slack, a widely used messaging platform which has become a crucial technology for many companies whose employees are working from home during the pandemic, started the new year off with an extensive outage as workers returned to their home offices (or simply opened their laptops again) after the holidays.
This morning at 10:14 a.m. EST, Slack gave a status update that customers “may have trouble loading channels or connecting to Slack.” Slack then tweeted at 10:51 a.m. EST that customers might be “experiencing issues connecting and using Slack at this time. Our team is currently investigating and we’re sorry for any trouble this may be causing.” At 11:20 am, the service upgraded the incident to an “outage in service.” Slack, which has about 10 million users worldwide, provided updates every 30 minutes on its “Slack Status” web page as the issue continues.
According to the website Downdetector, which monitors service outages, more than 15,000 people complained of connection issues, from Texas to the Ukraine. At around 12 p.m. EST, the service began returning for some users.
While it was hardly the best way to return to work, users, including many marketers, made light of the situation and asked if it called for an extra day of vacation. “Thank you for the extra day off,” tweeted Kelly Vaughn, founder of The Taproom Agency. “Slack’s busted, I vote we all go on vacation again,” tweeted Owen Williams, user experience manager at Shopify.
