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Slack serves up out-of-order messages, shaky comms as world goes back to work

Where are the documents? I'm waiting! Fancy a coffee? Happy new year!

Updated Messaging platform Slack is first out of the gates of 2021 with a good, old fashioned TITSUP*.

4 January was the first working day of 2021 for many, but as the clock passed the 15:00 UTC mark, and much of the US began to ruefully turn off their out-of-office notifications and stare blearily at inboxes rammed full of a festive fluff, hipster chat outfit Slack decided to extend the vacation for some by ignoring message requests.

Or delivering messages woefully late and, helpfully, in the wrong order.

"Customers may have trouble loading messages or connecting to Slack," the support orifice of the ridiculously overvalued firm intoned. A warning that some may struggle to load channels or even connect to the service was also proffered but other than an apology and a boilerplate "Our team is investigating and we will follow up with more information as soon as we have it," there was little help for those finding that their daily dose of prevarication was temporarily missing.

The previous emission from the Slack support team back on 23 November exclaimed: "Good news! The issues with degraded performance are no longer impacting customers."

Which is a bit unfortunate.

The messaging app, which may or may not be used by Vulture Central’s scribes as a means of avoiding seeing each other’s ugly mugs or hearing our rasping post-Christmas voices, stopped working smoothly at around quarter past 3 this afternoon.

The timing is unfortunate. Slack is due to be "deeply integrated into every Salesforce cloud" if trumpeting about the acquisition of the collaboration platform is to be believed. Presumably that will include the odd wobble just as the first working day of the year gets under way if today's antics are anything to go by.

Salesforce’s buyout of Slack is to leave chief exec Stewart Butterfield in charge of the messaging app, which is slated become an operating unit of the CRM software monolith. In a statement on 1 December when the buyout was announced Salesforce declared: “As the new interface for Salesforce Customer 360, Slack will transform how people communicate, collaborate and take action on customer information across Salesforce as well as information from all of their other business apps and systems.”

The purchase has not yet completed but is expected to do so in Q2 this coming fiscal year, meaning this summer in the northern hemisphere. Slack has 87 customers who pay $1m or more per year, as we reported last November. ®

* Total Inability To Support Usual Prattling

Updated at 16:24 UTC 4 January 2021 to add:

A spokesperson told us: "Our teams are aware and are investigating the issue. We know how important it is for people to stay connected and we are working hard to get everyone running as normal. For the latest updates please keep an eye on @slackstatus and status.slack.com."

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