It’s The Week of Outages: Users Face Issues As Slack Goes Down

Popular chat-based collaboration tool Slack suffered a service outage, which is suspected to have occurred due to a ‘problem’ in AWS’s London-based EU-WEST-2 region. Slack has fixed the issue which primarily affected users in the U.K. and Western Europe.

Slack’s Tuesday outage affected remote workers across Europe who were unable to send files and messages. The company confirmed the issue on its status update page. “Some people may be having an issue with Slack. We’re currently investigating and will have more information shortly. Thank you for your patience.” 

Issues included ‘unusual behaviour’ ranging from being unable to connect to Slack, unable to upload and send files, and old messages that were pushed to the top of the feed.  

See Also: Collaboration Tech Should Become Part of Disaster Recovery Program: Nextiva CIO

The Problem

Some users reported they were unable to upload and send files, while others revealed sending messages wasn’t a problem so much as the reappearance (and disappearance) of messages. Either way, they couldn’t communicate with each other over the workspace chat tool. However, the issues were a cross-platform occurrence — they affected users across all platforms, the web-based interface and mobile apps for Android and iOS.

The service disruption was largely observed across western Europe and the U.K. according to real-time website downtime reporting site, Downdetector. Reports of the outage started pouring in after 2:30 PM GMT (10:30 AM EDT) over online channels like Twitter and Reddit. 

See Also: Zoom’s Monday Blues Affects its Video Conferencing Services Globally

Impact of Outage 

Slack is a communications and collaboration tool used heavily by small and mid-sized businesses and enterprises. In the current remote workforce climate, the usage of Slack has surged. 

The disruption comes hot on the heels of Zoom’s global Monday outage which affected business and prevented millions of students from connecting to virtual classes. 

A Twitter user quipped: 

Company: Zoom is having some issues this morning so people can’t join meetings

Me: Finally my excuse to host sprint planning in Discord. Now I just need a slack outage as well and I never have to leave.

— Michael Salsone (@0xPopsiclestick) August 24, 2020Opens a new window

Be careful what you wish for!

The IndependentOpens a new window speculated problems in Amazon Web Services (AWS) may have led to the Slack outage. They said, “Amazon Web Services reported a problem with systems in its “EU-WEST-2” region, which covers London, and may be responsible for the problems at Slack.”

Cloud-based solutions have proven to be useful and empowering even before the COVID-19 pandemic  crippled the world. One of the ways in which cloud infrastructure vendors can ensure fault-tolerant services is by consistently scrutinizing server and system vulnerabilities, capacity, misconfigurations etc.

See Also: Google Issues a Fix for Gmail Outage, but Offers No Explanation

The Solution

Without going into details of the outage, Slack simply attributed the problem to ‘significant issues’. Slack said, “Some server instances for this region were experiencing significant issues that resulted in some instability.” 

This is the third major outage in the past seven days, after Google and Zoom. All companies, including Slack promptly resumed services but failed to explain why the disruption occurred.  

Slack revealed how they managed to resume normal operations by routing traffic away from affected servers. “We began to move customers away from the impacted region but it took longer than expected. We conducted a forcible withdrawal of the region’s traffic at 4:03 a.m. PDT (7:03 AM EDT) which successfully removed all traffic away from the impacted server instances,” explained Slack. 

“With this process being completed, Slack returned to normal for the affected users.”

Lesser than 90 minutes into Slack’s first acknowledgement, the company updated users that they should no longer face any issues. Slack issued the following resolution statement at 5:07 PM GMT (1:07 PM EDT): “Customers affected by issues with files and messages should no longer be having trouble. Apologies for the disruption to your day and thank you for your patience.”

The Aftermath

From continued relief efforts to regular business operations, we want to hear your team’s remote work success story. For every tweet we receive that includes both @SlackHQOpens a new window and #WhenRemoteWorksOpens a new window , we’ll donate $5 to @YearUpOpens a new window , up to a total of $200,000.

— Slack (@SlackHQ) August 25, 2020Opens a new window

Slack quickly sprung into action to normalize operations. The company also initiated a ‘share your remote work success story’ campaignOpens a new window over Twitter in partnership with Year Up. The campaign aims to create opportunities for those who are affected by the pandemic.

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