It appears Slack had the case of Monday Blues as the popular choice of remote workers suffered a massive outage. Users were unable to reliably send or receive messages. The platform is now showing signs of recovery but the speed and reliability are still troublesome.
Just as millions of people headed back to their real and virtual offices after the Holidays, Slack decided to hit the snooze button. The company greeted many users on Monday morning with the message: “Some customers may be able to connect, but may also experience degraded performance. We’re continuing to work to resolve the issue.”
Slack doesn’t start the New Year on the right footing as it slips and falters on the first official working day of 2021:
Slack stumbled and fell for many on the first official working day of 2021. The workplace messaging and collaboration platform that reliably helped remote working employees was down.
Slack suffered a more than three-hour outage on Monday. The disruption in service prevented quite a few users from sending messages or connecting to the service.
Users claimed to face several weird issues as Slack seemed to perform arbitrarily. The chat messaging module within the platform gave the most trouble on January 4, 2021.
Slack crash: business messaging app goes down for many users https://t.co/tS1aGMwOeh
— CW33 TV (@CW33) January 4, 2021
Needless to mention, the first official working day, after the new year began over the weekend, was more than Slack could handle. The service wasn’t completely down but behaved erratically.
Chats appeared to work, but suddenly froze and refused to cooperate. The text would appear to send but then show as grey within the chat, indicating that it had not actually been delivered.
We actually had to email and text to communicate with team members this morning (gasp!). We missed our @SlackHQ 😫. "Slack's massive outage gives brands a meme to start the new year" https://t.co/dQKF3rwEQz #slackdown #letsgo2021 pic.twitter.com/Nl5cIUpf7m
— Outsource Marketing (@outmark) January 4, 2021
Some areas within the Slack application, as well as the website, remained inaccessible for about three hours. As expected, despite the surge in complaints, Slack chose to remain silent, as if it was hoping its servers would chug a cup of Joe, wake up, and work reliably.
Although the official Twitter account of Slack did offer a brief apology Tweet, the company did not give any indication that it was aware of the cause of the issue. Moreover, Slack didn’t offer any indication of when it might be back online.
Slack’s stumble propels it to the top of Twitter’s trending list:
Slack appears to be back up and running for many people after nearly three hours of an outage. However, the company’s Status Page indicated it was still working to completely resolve the issues and that some customers “may experience degraded performance.”
@SlackHQ is back for some – but not all – after more than three-hour outage. https://t.co/VAhUBnid4B via @CNET #messaging #apps
— Blueshift Innovations (@blueshiftco) January 4, 2021
It is still not clear why Slack’s servers went down, albeit only partially. Moreover, as of writing this article, Slack’s last message reads: “Customers may have trouble loading channels or connecting to Slack at this time. Our team is investigating and we’ll follow up with more information as soon as we have it. We apologize for any disruption caused.”
When you realize you received a slack message saying Slack is down pic.twitter.com/F1R9UCaH52
— Kevin Ottley (@iAmOttaz) January 4, 2021
Simply put, Slack has experienced some serious problems. It is not clear if it was the Monday morning rush or some security threat. Incidentally, even Apple’s servers had experienced similar troubles on Christmas Day. And Google too went down for a brief period of time.
As expected, Slack’s outage quickly propelled the company to the top of Twitter’s Trending Topics. Many social media users vented their angst against the company while others joked.