Yes, Slack isn't working properly right now – enjoy your internet snow day

Chat app chaps slapped, rapped for leaving yakkity-yakkers in a flap

Final update It's not just you. Slack is indeed having a wobbly day, leaving people unable to message each other as usual.

For the past three or so hours, the Salesforce-owned IRC-like chat app has suffered a partial outage affecting users' ability to login and converse reliably. "Something's not quite right," as the biz put it about its degraded functionality.

Slack can be used for fun and work, particularly in this remote-slash-hybrid office era, with about 40 million daily users and more than 750,000 organizations signed up. Here at El Reg, we didn't even notice any major problems with our workspace, though thousands of netizens have hit DownDetector.com with complaints of crappy service, and judging from angry reader emails, y'all had problems with the system, too.

"Slack has been tits-up for nearly two hours and you haven't got a pun-filled rant about it?" one fan thundered to us earlier. "Why am I even reading your site any more?"

Sorry, we were too busy watching ourselves on Stephen Colbert. We didn't even get a chance to put on a flame-proof suit.

It all kicked off around 0730 PT (1530 UTC), when on its status page, Slack acknowledged: "We're investigating reports of trouble connecting or loading Slack, we'll provide another update once we have news to share."

By 0800 PT, the biz said it was in the process of fixing whatever is up with its stack: "We're still working to restore functionality to affected Slack features but have also discovered some workflows may also be experiencing issues. We appreciate your patience as we sort this out."

At 1100 PT, as we were typing like madmen to get this story out, Slack admitted it remains scratching its head:

We're still looking into the cause of the issue and working on restoring functionality to affected features such as workflows, sending messages, threads and API-related features. Users may also continue to experience issues when attempting to log-in. We'll provide new information as soon as it's available.

Consider this an internet snow day. As one netizen put it on DownDetector, "My boss is working from home ... so I should slack off and study since she can't see me."

"I'll cut them some Slack," quipped another.

We'll let you know more as it happens. ®

Updated to add at 1325 PT (2125 UTC)

It's been roughly six hours since this SNAFU started, and Slack says it's been able to figure out what is up, it's having to repair its databases, and it's continuing to work on making its service reliable again.

"We identified the cause of the issue and are continuing to monitor our health metrics, but we are still not fully resolved," the biz said. "Some users may still reproduce symptoms such as issues loading their workspaces.

"Our work is still ongoing to restore affected backend services to returning functionality to impacted features.

"Remediation work involves repairing affected database shards, which are causing feature degradation issues. This has become a diligent process to ensure we're prioritizing the database replicas with the most impact. We are working to restore functionality to all of the database shards."

As for what's working properly and what's not, here's the score, according to Slack:

Users may still be experiencing issues loading Slack, using workflows, sending messages or loading threads. API-related actions may also be degraded in speed. While some users may notice improvements, we remain focused on resolving the issues and are working on this with the highest urgency.

Final update at 0215 UTC, February 27

Slack has declared it has "restored full functionality to all affected Slack features."

For those still encountering flaky service, it suggests reloading the site in your browser. "Thank you for your patience while we worked to resolve this issue," it added.