Slack – a popular business communications platform used by a slew of Fortune 500 companies, as well as a range of other businesses – has been refusing to let users send messages this morning.
Although the company has now acknowledged an issue occurred, there’s little information about why the outage happened. Some users are now reporting that Slack is working again, and messages are sending. Slack's system status page suggests the issue has been solved.
Customers Report Issues on Slack
Slack users have been reporting issues with the platform since around 10:00 am today when DownDetector became flooded with thousands of reports:
72% of reporters say they're having issues with messages, 15% say simply that it is App, while 13% referenced a server connection as the problem.
The Slack system status page – which provides real-time updates on the health of the service – initially showed no issues at this point, but was subsequently updated at 10:35 am, when this message appeared:
“Users may be experiencing trouble with sending messages in Slack. We’re investigating and will let you know as soon as we know more. We appreciate your patience in the meantime.”
Then, at 10:57 am, Slack updated the report with this message:
“Slack experiencing an outage across the app. Users may be experiencing trouble with sending messages, using workflows, and various other actions in Slack. We’re investigating and will let you know as soon as we know more. We appreciate your patience in the meantime.”
Slack initially classified the issue as an “incident” rather than an “outage”, but that has now been changed. It seems that user issues largely center around communication and messaging, with many unable to post in channels or send direct messages to one another.
However, it seems that some users are now able to send messages once more, and Slack's system status page now suggests the issue has been resolved.
What Can I Do If Slack Is Down?
Over 600,000 companies use Slack worldwide, but it's unclear if all of them have been affected by the recent issue. The number of issue reports suggests that the incident has impacted a large proportion of Slack's user base, however.
In this situation, there's very little businesses can do, other than revert back to messaging on email, or use platforms like WhatsApp. As we've said alreadty, some users are now reporting that Slack is working again – so hopefully, everything will be back to normal soon.
