Slack went out for hours on January 4, 2021, slowing down remote workflows around the world. The widespread outage started around 10am EST, and lasted until 3pm EST.
Slack Outage Gave Users Time to Slack Off
Slack's 2021 isn't off to a great start. Now that the New Year has passed, workers are getting back in the flow of their typical workday. And with the COVID-19 pandemic still lingering around the globe, a lot of this work takes place remotely.
At the start of the outage, it seemed like Slack was just running a little slower. An update on Slack's Status page calmly declared that "customers may have trouble loading channels or connecting to Slack at this time," which doesn't seem too bad, right?
Unfortunately, it was worse than Slack initially thought. Fast-forward to an hour or so later, and users couldn't view or send messages on the platform at all.
At 11:20am EST, Slack sent out another update on its Status page, in which the platform acknowledged that it was experiencing a full-blown outage:
We're continuing to investigate connection issues for customers, and have upgraded the incident on our side to reflect an outage in service. All hands are on deck on our end to further investigate. We'll be back in a half hour to keep you posted.
Slack continued to provide updates every 30 minutes during the outage. It later said that "some customers may see improvement in connecting to Slack after a refresh" by pressing Ctrl/Cmd + R.
At 1PM EST, Slack told users that some users "may be able to connect, but may also experience degraded performance." This meant long loading times, and the inability to view certain messages.
It wasn't until around 3PM EST when Slack fully resolved the issue. At this time of writing, we still don't know what caused the outage. Slack apologized for the disruption, and said that it will "be back with a summary of this issue."
Despite fixing the outage, Slack still hasn't fixed an issue regarding Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar, and email notifications. Slack notes that "Google Calendar and Outlook Calendar aren't working as expected, and some email notifications (e.g. a notification of a new direct message in Slack) are failing to send."
Remote Communication Has Become More Important Than Ever
Slack's outage just goes to show how much remote workers rely on the platform for communication. The pandemic has given Slack a larger audience than ever before, which puts even more pressure on the service to perform. In case of Slack outages in the future, it doesn't hurt to have a backup communication plan on hand.