Slack Outage Disrupted Work Messaging
Slack reported an outage on February 26 and 27, with most features back up by Thursday but some issues with messaging still persisting; in particular, some custom apps and bots did not work as expected. In addition, a problem with Slack Connect meant coworkers might not get notified if someone pinged them with the @ command. According to Downdetector, about 3,000 people had reported issues at the peak of the problem.
As of Thursday morning, Slack said most features had been restored. Users still experiencing trouble were advised to reload Slack (Command + Shift + R on Mac or Ctrl + Shift + R on Windows or Linux).
Slack team’s response to the outage, including Slack Connect tips
The loss of functionality on Wednesday was “related to Events API and is a symptom of an earlier incident about trouble connecting to or loading Slack,” plus an unrelated problem with Slack Connect causing the lack of notifications, Slack said.
Our workplace sysadmin team announced problems with Slack at around 1:00 p.m. EST on February 26, with some employees being unable to post messages. (My work was not disrupted.)
SEE: Slack added tools for automatically building workflows, including for developers.
By Wednesday evening, Slack’s status site said, “We’re continuing to diligently work on database shard repair and have made progress on restoring affected replicas, though users may still be experiencing impact.”
Later that day, Slack personnel were working on “re-processing of the backend job to attempt to serve queued Events API requests.” Slack suggested the following mitigation for users having trouble mentioning others using Slack Connect:
- Open the Slack desktop app, then click Help in your computer’s top menu bar. (On Windows 10, click the three horizontal lines icon in the top left of the Slack app.)
- Select Troubleshooting.
- Click Clear Cache and restart.
The Slack team said the cause of the outage was “a symptom of an earlier incident,” and did not specify further.
Messages, workflows, threads, and other API-related features were last to come back online.
Past outages and Slack’s place in the market
Slack hasn’t had a major outage like this since July 2023. Prior to that, the service went down several times in 2022 and in January 2021.
Slack is a major partner in Salesforce’s Agentforce generative AI effort.
Competitors to Slack include Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, and Pumble.
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