Slack Outage: Users Report Widespread Issues, Criticize Official Response
Users on Hacker News recently experienced and discussed a significant, intermittent outage affecting Slack. The initial post queried if others were facing connectivity issues, as Slack's official status page had not yet been updated. This quickly garnered numerous confirmations from other users.
Widespread Issues and User Experiences
Users reported a variety of problems, indicative of a widespread service degradation:
- Inability to load Slack or connect to workspaces.
- Messages failing to send, sometimes requiring retries.
- Sent and received messages appearing duplicated.
- Intermittent loading of threads and content.
- Display of error pages.
- Being randomly logged out.
The outage wasn't isolated to just a few, with many confirming similar experiences across their companies. The intermittent nature was a common theme, with Slack sometimes working briefly before failing again.
Frustration with Official Communication
A significant point of discussion was the perceived delay and handling of the situation by Slack (and its parent company, Salesforce). One highly upvoted comment expressed strong frustration, speculating that an employee's bonus might be tied to classifying the event as an "incident" rather than a full-fledged "outage." This commenter poignantly pointed out the hypocrisy of downplaying an issue that affects "critical, operational processes" which Slack itself promotes in its sales, marketing case studies, and documentation, providing several links to such materials.
Users noted that Slack's official status page (slack-status.com) was slow to update, initially showing no incidents. Eventually, an update acknowledged that "Users experiencing issues connecting to Slack and unable to load threads." Third-party services like downdetector.com were also referenced as quicker sources of information.
Broader Impact and Related Outages
The discussion highlighted how deeply integrated Slack has become into daily operations for many businesses, making such outages highly disruptive. The sarcastic remark about Slack's "uptime of 100%" needing an update reflected this sentiment.
Interestingly, some users reported that other major services, including Fastmail, Claude, and Github, were also experiencing intermittent outages and login issues around the same time. This led to speculation about whether the problems were related or part of a larger underlying infrastructure issue.
In summary, the Hacker News community served as a real-time confirmation hub for the Slack outage, a platform for users to share their specific experiences, and a space to voice frustrations regarding official communication and the operational impact of such service disruptions.