Slack outage stymies some business users

Some Slack users reported they were unable to access the collaboration app on Tuesday morning.  

The outage was first reported by Slack at 9:25 a.m. ET as many US workers returned to work following the President’s Day holiday weekend. Thousands of Slack users reported problems loading the app on DownDetector.com; the problems had yet to be resolved two hours after the interruptions began.

DownDetector.com

“Slack is not loading for some users,” the company said in an update at 10:23 a.m. ET on its service status page. “We are continuing to investigate the cause and will provide more information as soon as it’s available.”  

Slack, which was acquired by Salesforce last year for $27.7 billion, has more 12 million daily active users. That’s according to its most recently released stats from October 2019, so it’s likely the number is considerably higher now.

While Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) vendors typically provide high levels of uptime, outages are not uncommon. Slack was one of a number of SaaS vendors knocked offline last December due to an outage at cloud provider Amazon Web Services’ US East 1 data center apparently related to network device failure. Slack’s services were also disrupted last September as a DNS configuration change created issues for some users. 

Slack did not immediately respond to questions seeking more information on the cause of the outage and how many users have been affected.

Slack