Workplace communication platform Slack hit a snag on Tuesday morning, which caused a global disruption to its services for over three hours. For reasons unknown, Slack was down across the Americas, Europe, Asia, Northern Africa, and Oceania.
Slack seems to have hit the snooze button a bit too hard after the extended President’s Day weekend. On Tuesday, the business communication platform suffered a service outage at 9:25 AM EST. This is the first significant outage suffered by Slack in 2022.
Users on the platform could not send or receive messages, upload files, join channels, and were completely shut out from the desktop application. Following significant buzz on social media, Slack released a short, helpless message for affected users (including us): “Sorry we can’t be more specific — this is one of those cases where we don’t know what’s gone wrong either.â€
We still don’t, according to the Salesforce-owned company’s status update page. The outage message on the desktop app to locked out users added: “A restart of Slack may help.†It did not.
The communication service finally resumed at 2:24 PM EST, three and a half hours after it went down. The reason for the disruption to the delayed start of the week remains unknown. However, not many users have any complaints, going by some hilarious replies to the platform’s official Twitter handle.
“mild” slack outage pic.twitter.com/7bUo47gTluOpens a new window
— Andrew Morris (@Andrew___Morris) February 22, 2022Opens a new window
The only hint is this: “You may need to reload Slack (Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + R) to see the fix on your end. If that doesn’t work, try clearing cache (Help > Troubleshooting > Clear Cache and Restart from the app menu).†Make what you will of that.
Ancient Sysadmin Wisdom states that if an outage goes over ten minutes, you can expect it to be a hell of a lot longer.
Two hours in with no updates past “investigating†tells us that we should plan on not using Slack today.
— Corey Quinn (@QuinnyPig) February 22, 2022Opens a new window
See More: AWS Outage: Lessons for Organizations to Mitigate the Fallout
Others, meanwhile, are cutting Slack some slack:
Whenever people ask me “what made Slack successful?” the number one answer I give is the customer support team and the tone they take with speaking with customers. Few enterprise brands that have built this level of empathy with their customers….especially after an outage. pic.twitter.com/0LvyFS8rsLOpens a new window
— Mat Mullen (@matmullen) February 23, 2022Opens a new window
Amazon Web ServicesOpens a new window , which was also facing a service disruption around the same time as Slack yesterday, is leveraged by and is the preferred cloud provider of the communication platform. Neither Slack nor AWS has confirmed if both outages are related.
pic.twitter.com/9RX1WKuPs2Opens a new window
— Sav (@InfoSecSav) December 23, 2021Opens a new window
Users worldwide were hit by the service disruption. Real-time website status provider Downdetector displayed 11,001 outage reports peaking around 9:16 AM EST.
Source: DowndetectorOpens a new window
Based on social media chatter, Slack’s services went offline in:
- North America (U.S., Mexico, Costa Rica, Jamaica)
- South America (Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Peru, Honduras, Ecuador, Uruguay)
- Europe (France, Germany, Netherlands, Italy, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Switzerland, Poland, Portugal, Serbia, Greece, Czech Republic, Estonia, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Slovenia, Ireland, Finland, Belgium, Spain, Bulgaria)
- Asia (India, Malaysia, South Korea, Israel, Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Indonesia, Japan, Turkey, Cyprus)
- Africa (South Africa, some countries in the northern part)
- Oceania (Australia New Zealand)
And possibly Mars.
At this point, there are random reports on exactly which Slack interface, i.e., web, mobile app, desktop client, was down in which part of the world. For instance, the mobile app functioned in India, but the desktop app didn’t.
Some users could resolve the issue themselves by resetting the DNS to 1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4. All three are free public DNS’s owned by Cloudflare (first) and Google (latter two).
Slack wasn’t the only service to go down in the last 24 hours. Microsoft’s open-source code repository GitHubOpens a new window , interactive fitness platform PelotonOpens a new window , game distribution service SteamOpens a new window , telecom service VerizonOpens a new window , FacebookOpens a new window , email marketing service MailchimpOpens a new window , retailer WalmartOpens a new window , discussion forum RedditOpens a new window , and some popular games (GTA V online, Counter-Strike, Dota 2) also suffered outages.
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