Work chat app Slack suffers services outage

Affected users: Is this a not-so-subtle hint from the boss?

Slack has fallen over for a subset of users, as the messaging platform admitted that "something's not quite right" with a number of its critical services.

The outage coincides with the return to work from a three-day weekend for many of the company's US users.

Signs that all was not running perfectly were posted on Down Detector at around 14.20 UTC (08.20 Central), and minutes later Slack's own status page subsequently confirmed issues with log-ins, connections, messaging, posts/ files and notifications.

"We're investigating the issue where Slack is not loading for some users. We’re looking into the cause and will provide more information as soon as it is available," Slack's status page still states at the time of writing.

Service interruption has become a feature of life in 2022 for Slack's customers – of which The Register is one. Users suffered multiple problems last month ranging from dropping connectivity to 2FA SMS messages not being sent and things weren't entirely smooth in February either.

Just yesterday, for example, the firm said in its status page (February 21, 2022 from 4:34 PM PST to 5:32 PM PST), troubled connections and botched message sending occured after "a code change inadvertently caused a conflict in the desktop app and web client, preventing a small number of customers from sending messages." In that case, the firm said it reverted the change, "resolving the issue for all affected customers."

But Slack has not said what exactly happened to its services today, noting only that it was "not loading for some users" and that it was looking into what was going on. At time of writing, SSO, connections, notification and messaging were all still reporting issues.

In January last year the comms platform suffered an hours-long outage caused by a scaling problem in its AWS Transit Gateways, according to the company. A return to work following a holiday would certainly trigger a spike in demand this time around.

Later in 2021, Slack fell victim to friend of outage-followers everywhere: DNS. Backing out a borked change to its DNS records left the sites struggling for many users.

While affected users await resolution, social media has been predictably supportive.

The paradox here is how I communicate to my co-workers that Slack is not loading pic.twitter.com/xayB2GLP9r

— Sean C. Rife (@seanrife) February 22, 2022

Sean, we feel your pain. We'd suggest a beverage and a pastry before commencing a day of unexpected productivity. Or simply head for home – if your messaging platform of choice has whoopsie for a more than a few minutes, those are the rules, right? ®