Slack Confirms Outage That Affected Thousands

‘We’re still monitoring the situation,’ the San Francisco-based company said on the company’s status page. ‘We’ll confirm once this issue is fully resolved.’

Slack users were hit with a major outage Tuesday, the collaboration tools company confirmed on a status page on Slack’s website.

At 11:24 a.m. Pacific Time, Slack – a Salesforce subsidiary – announced the issue resolved.

“We've resolved the issue, and all impacted customers should now be able to access Slack,” according to a post on Slack’s status page. “You may need to reload Slack (Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + R) to see the fix on your end. If that doesn't work, try clearing cache (Help > Troubleshooting > Clear Cache and Restart from the app menu). Thanks for bearing with us and we apologize for the disruption to your work day!”

[RELATED: Twitter Fixes Bug That Caused Brief Outage]

Slack’s first message on the issue came at 6:25 a.m. Pacific. ”We’re investigating the issue where Slack is not loading for some users,” according to the message. “We’re looking into the cause and will provide more information as soon as it's available.”

Slack posted nine updates in total on the outage. The status update page indicated that users had trouble logging in, posting, receiving notifications and calling, among other capabilities.

Almost 11,000 reports of a Slack outage were logged on Downdetector at 6:19 a.m. Tuesday.

The occasional outage of internet-based services such as Slack, Twitter and the major cloud services by Microsoft, Amazon and Google remains an issue with adopting such services. Tuesday’s outage is not Slack’s first, with at least one reported outage last year.

Outages can range from a temporary nuisance to blocking users from mission critical applications and services. In December, an Amazon Web Services outage downed services from ConnectWise, Netflix, Disney+, Ticketmaster, Flickr and others.

Partners have told CRN that they expect cloud outages to happen from time to time but that the normally quick recovery time plus the added benefits of cloud environments to a business’ IT operations outweigh the consequences of an outage.

George Burns III, senior consultant for cloud operations at Chicago-based SPR – whose vendor partners include Microsoft, AWS, Snowflake and Databricks – told CRN in an interview after the AWS outage that the loss of log data and the “less than graceful” way services returned after the outage was more of a concern than the outage itself.

“If someone's freaking out over the fact that there was an outage, that is misplaced expectations,” Burns said. “None of this is going to work 100 percent of the time.”

The key to overcoming cloud outages is resiliency and application disaster recovery tools from the vendors, Burns said.

“Applications need to be multimodal – they need to be able to be agile,” he said. “Our workflows are agile. We're making our teams agile, we're making our business processes agile. These applications that we're building in these agile processes need to be agile themselves.”