15 ms·

Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

468 points by abdullahdiaa 8y ago

collinvandyck76 8y ago
The issue I'm having is that I can't send messages. Reading them is fine. The dashboards on the walls at SlackHQ must be pretty interesting right now.
- geerlingguy 8y ago
  Yeah, a strange failure mode; I was even notified of a new message a few minutes ago, but couldn't post a reply.
- bshimmin 8y ago
  If you want to stop being able to receive them as well, just hit reload (then you won't be able to reconnect).
tapoxi 8y ago
It's times like this I wish there was a solid decentralized standard to pick from, but there's no clear choice between XMPP and Matrix.
- alexkavon 8y ago
  Create a new one![0] [0] https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
- rkeene2 8y ago
  There's always IRC ;-)
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - samuell 8y ago
    IRC is actually viable, with https://riot.im https://riot.im for offline logging and mobile access.
- dielan 8y ago
  Matrix is my preference for sure. It's fresh and exciting. While XMPP is harder to talk people into trying
  - edhelas 8y ago
    If you are interested we are building a communication platform for communities fully based on XMPP https://movim.eu/ https://movim.eu/ :) It can easily be deployed on a Web server.
  - cbm-vic-20 8y ago
    Their site (https://matrix.org https://matrix.org) reeks of hype-oriented engineering. From the most cursory overview of their home page, their decentralization looks a lot like IRC peering.
    - dijit 8y ago
      The federation elements actually work pretty well, more similar to XMPP than IRC.
- mynewtb 8y ago
  Zulip is amazing, is a self hosted system without federation is an option for you.
  - tomstockmail 8y ago
    Love the workflow with Zulip, but I hope they work out a way to join in with either Matrix or IRC3+ federation.
- sanderjd 8y ago
  It's not about the protocols, it's about having a client with a user experience that is acceptable to an entire company rather than just a team of engineers. Which decentralized protocol has such a client? (Speaking as someone who got burned trying to advocate for IRC at a company that eventually and inevitably switched to Slack.)
  - tapoxi 8y ago
    There's plenty of decent XMPP clients, like Spark (https://igniterealtime.org/projects/spark/ https://igniterealtime.org/projects/spark/) but they'd take an IT team to configure. Matrix has Riot (https://riot.im/app https://riot.im/app) but personally I find it incredibly confusing.
    - sanderjd 8y ago
      I'll have to take a look at Spark. I don't think it's a problem if something needs to be initially deployed and configured by an IT department (or otherwise tech savvy individual or group), as long as its onboarding and primary usage flows are straightforward. An arbitrary non-tech-savvy but internet-familiar employee needs to be able to create an account, browse and join rooms, and search through history without any hand-holding. Slack and its direct competitors pass this test. IRC doesn't. Does Spark?
      - tapoxi 8y ago
        It's certainly the closest of all XMPP clients I've used, since it has a very friendly interface. Their related Openfire XMPP server is also targeted at internal deployments and is very easy to configure with a web UI.
  - ummonk 8y ago
    Curious why you got burned with IRC client UX given the multitude of clients available for it.
    - swozey 8y ago
- kirbypineapple 8y ago
  We use Slack for everyday company wide communication/ announcements and Riot for encrypted secure communications (you can host Riot yourself): https://about.riot.im/ https://about.riot.im/
sdf43543t345 8y ago
IRC had uptime in the scale of decades. Why are our 2018 solutions so fragile?
- microcolonel 8y ago
  Because they're single-source, single-point-of-failure (in the case of Slack), and very very very complex.
- bonyt 8y ago
  I mean, most IRC networks at least have netsplits from time to time.
- Waterluvian 8y ago
  I recall net splits happening all the time so I'm not sure that ircs uptime was a practical real world "decades".
- orf 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netsplit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netsplit
  - mirages 8y ago
    Anybody knows why the netsplit was written *.net *.split Why those stars and dots ?
    - whafro 8y ago
      I believe it's an effort to show a netsplit in the traditional form (server1, server2) without placing blame on a particular server. Back when I IRCd regularly (and perhaps this is still the case today), certain servers would get a reputation for splitting more than others, and I think this network (and/or its ircd) decided to mask it without breaking the general format.
    - nexxer 8y ago
      It's to avoid showing the server names to the public on some IRC networks for various reasons including security through (some) obscurity.
drewg123 8y ago
The funny thing is that sending normal messages just times out 90% of the time. But /me comments generate an error after timeout: slackbot9:28 AM /me throws shoe at slack failed with the error "ASSocket: timed out reading 4 bytes from adminserver-3wvr:10443" We've switched to google hangouts as an ad-hoc workaround..
spraak 8y ago
What does Slack as a company use to communicate when Slack the product is down? :>
- parliament32 8y ago
  Almost definitely IRC, just like Google does. https://landing.google.com/sre/book/chapters/managing-incidents.html https://landing.google.com/sre/book/chapters/managing-incide...
coldseattle 8y ago
And productivity is up!
- setquk 8y ago
  Can confirm. No wait, the first thing I did was check HN and now am reading this and oh there's another interesting thing.
  - shawn 8y ago
    HN's noprocrast setting cures that.
    - pwenzel 8y ago
      It works all too well. This will be my last comment of the day before noprocrast kicks me off HN.
    - setquk 8y ago
      Thank you for pointing this feature out. I had no idea what that flag did.
- orf 8y ago
  Hacker news can take the... slack.
- MiyamotoAkira 8y ago
  What productivity? I am here on HN
cimmanom 8y ago
What backup methods of communication are distributed teams using when Slack goes down?
- cagrimmett 8y ago
  My team uses Voxer threads as backup during times like this. We also use Voxer when it takes too long to type explanations out on Slack.
- dev360 8y ago
  Message in a bottle
- geerlingguy 8y ago
  Email, if it's actually important. Then if emergency, you can always hop on IRC, Skype, Messages/SMS, etc.
- jekrb 8y ago
  Secure Scuttlebutt
  - bobx11 8y ago
    Is this a bob reference??
    - bovermyer 8y ago
      https://github.com/ssbc/secure-scuttlebutt https://github.com/ssbc/secure-scuttlebutt
- philg_jr 8y ago
  IPoAC (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149)
- neuromantik8086 8y ago
  My group uses Roman fire signals [1]. [1] http://www.romanobritain.org/8-military/mil_signalling_systems.htm http://www.romanobritain.org/8-military/mil_signalling_syste...
majewsky 8y ago
Even Slack Enterprise is affected. So much about "this runs on your own infrastructure".
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- nixgeek 8y ago
  Slack Enterprise has never run on your own infrastructure.
  - majewsky 8y ago
    It doesn't? I thought that was its only reason to exist.
    - nixgeek 8y ago
      It’s pitch is a little different, it gives you ‘Workspaces’ which are somewhat connected, and tools to manage big deployments. IBM, Oracle and many large companies use it because 100,000+ participants in one workspace is quite unmanageable. Think channel namespacing whilst unifying user provisioning and enabling DM and MPDM across the entire company. Users can have access to one or many namespaces, they sign in once and it populates all enabled workspaces into that users client. You can share channels between workspace within Enterprise Grid fairly trivially (although this now works between Slack tenancies owned by different companies too!) Still runs on the same infrastructure in AWS as other Slack customers though. From a policy perspective you can push down settings to all Workspaces in your SEG, and define whether you “centrally control” or “delegate to Workspace owners” on a setting by setting basis.
ataturk 8y ago
Wish there was a JIRA outage at my work.
sarreph 8y ago
You know how much of the community uses one messaging system when 15 minutes after it going down, it has over 40 points on the front page! This says a lot about how it's a single point of failure in modern company comms. It's even worrying to think about how some users probably have production-dependent (dare I postulate it) workflows in Slack that get crippled by its outage... ITT: Chat about decentralisation that will ultimately lead to no action.* *Because we've had this discussion so many times before...
- ivm 8y ago
  Luckily most of my active communities are on Discord nowadays. It works much faster and even has a dark theme by default.
  - asdojasdosadsa 8y ago
    It's lovely how in Slack.app if you want dark theme, you have to modify the internet javascript files...
  - rkeene2 8y ago
    But it's not any less centralized, which I think was the complaint, not that it was popular even though this was mentioned.
    - sarreph 8y ago
      > which I think was the complaint Spot on, not that I know anything about Discord's architecture...
  - palencharizard 8y ago
    > even has a dark theme by default. I love how having a dark theme is second only to "it works" in terms of how we pick services these days XD
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
bgribble 8y ago
Maybe unrelated, but my AWS-hosted websockets-using app had an outage starting at the same time. Also a third-party API provider we use for handling inbound phone calls. So this smells like a wider outage than just Slack.
- switch007 8y ago
  That's interesting. More speculation: they haven't given any detail in 2 hours, perhaps if it's an upstream/3rd-party problem, they haven't been given any info.
  - bgribble 8y ago
    I know it's not exactly scientific, but the front page of https://downdetector.com https://downdetector.com shows a number of services that have problem spikes starting anywhere from 3am US/Eastern to 9am US/Eastern and continuing through now (11:24 US/Eastern): Google Home, Fortnite, Exede, Level 3, New York Times, AWS. Maybe totally unrelated to each other, who knows.
    - dawnerd 8y ago
      That certainly does look suspicious there - especially level3.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- kohanz 8y ago
  I'm wondering the same thing. I chose this morning to soft-launch my side-project/startup and sent out the sign-up link to my e-mail list. Of course, it's AWS Cognito-based, was working yesterday, but failed for the new users. Great timing! Phone support said they are looking into some outages (even though the status page is all green).
- Maxion 8y ago
  Telegram was down too just half an hour before slack. Dunno if they run on aws?
amarraja 8y ago
Spare a thought for the chatops crowd who may be blissfully unaware that their own infrastructure is down
- neuromantik8086 8y ago
  I have little pity for the folks who decided that re-implementing a shell in a chat application was a well-conceived notion.
  - amarraja 8y ago
    Hopefully they're learning this lesson. I can just see it now. A company's app is dying from all the timeouts to a slack webhook, however they can't deploy because slack is down.
    - bovermyer 8y ago
      Oh god. Who would have a Slack webhook as a blocking part of their pipeline??
    - yeldarb 8y ago
      It's just login that's not working it seems. I keep getting automated push notifications from our bots (but I still can't connect to the app myself). We use it for things like relaying user-flagged messages to our support team and reminding us when scheduled content has been automatically released.
gsich 8y ago
Thats the problem without self-hosting your essential stuff.
- gtsteve 8y ago
  I don't see it as too much of a problem so long as you're not one of those teams that orchestrates their deployments using a Slack bot. Just make sure you have an agreed backup mechanism, i.e. Google Hangouts, Zoom, etc.
- borplk 8y ago
  self-hosting doesn't imply automatic and better uptime than the hosted version. most people are much better off letting dedicated teams of tens of people take care of the hosted version for them.
- strunz 8y ago
  Funny, our self-hosted infrastructure goes down weekly.
  - slenk 8y ago
    No offense, but you're probably doing it wrong
    - FooBarWidget 8y ago
      You just gave a good argument of why s/he should use Slack. Yeah s/he might be doing it wrong, but so what? One should focus on core business, not system administration.
      - Dirlewanger 8y ago
        Yup, every time one of the popular centralized XaaS platforms go down, there's always the snarky "Heh, well my stuff is self-hosted...", and they are always the types that have no idea how to value their time.
- 8y ago
chrismatheson 8y ago
Skype still up
Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
If only there were a venerable, decentralized instant messaging system we could use, perhaps some kind of internet relay chat system... </sarcasm> You reap what you sow. Depending on Slack for your communications is a bad idea. I can't even remember the last time any of the IRC networks I frequent had a total outage.
- crankylinuxuser 8y ago
  Irc left out federation when the spec was crafted in 1984. It was deemed to bandwidth heavy. Jabber/xmpp was a good step in the right direction. Too bad it overused plugins and bad extensions and XML abuse. Would have been loads better had they though far enough in advance.
  - Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
    It's not federated, but it is distributed and fault tolerant. The protocol is open and widely implemented and the implementations are mature and stable.
    - peterwwillis 8y ago
      I mean, Slack isn't federated either. I don't know of any chat platforms that are federated except Jabber. edit Gchat and AIM federated in 2011, but AIM is dead now, so...
- maxerickson 8y ago
  So you are saying people should sow discord?
  - Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
    No. People should use IRC.
    - snom380 8y ago
      In practice, all the attempts I've seen at getting a significant number of non-techies in a company to use IRC have failed. At one company, we almost got everyone on Jabber, but it was never used much outside the tech circles. Slack? Everyone is using it and most seem happy about it, and it does a lot more than IRC.
aliljet 8y ago
Are there solid Slack-style self-hosted alternatives? (The gitlab of the slack world, to be clear.)
- JeanFred 8y ago
  Gitlab itself ships with Mattermost <https://mattermost.com/> https://mattermost.com/> :)
  - aliljet 8y ago
    This doesn't look half bad... while slack's down, seems like a pretty optimal chance to try https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server
- nullify88 8y ago
  We're giving Mattermost a good try now!
- nixgeek 8y ago
  Mattermost is actually integrated with GitLab - so yes - options do exist. There’s stuff like Rocket Chat and I think Dropbox released one as OSS a while back resultant from an acquihire, but the name escapes me now.
- oneneptune 8y ago
  Atlassian, the folks behind bitbucket, jira, and (now) trello have a self hosted product: https://www.atlassian.com/software/hipchat https://www.atlassian.com/software/hipchat They also have a Slack alternative, called Stride.
  - SteveNuts 8y ago
    Hipchat doesn't exactly have a stellar uptime record either.
  - rattray 8y ago
    Has anyone here used Stride? Reviews?
anonu 8y ago
Previous outages: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16108912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16108912 - 5 months ago (longer discussion) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15597461 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15597461 - 7 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15597431 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15597431 - 8 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13811815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13811815 - 1 year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10616743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10616743 - 3 years ago
- rileyt 8y ago
  There is also this https://status.slack.com/calendar https://status.slack.com/calendar, but they seem to grossly under report the actual downtime... [edit] note that including this outage, they are reporting to have missed their monthly uptime guarantee 3 months in a row.
  - dexterdog 8y ago
    Yeah, stripe does the same thing with their status page. I get alerts that they have an outage at least once a week and more often than not it never shows up as anything in their history. Honestly this is my only significant beef with the service and I've been using it for years now with multiple integrations.
- nojvek 8y ago
  In light of how Slack and other companies haven't been able to get a decent level of uptime, I have to say, the company known to make huge web applications that don't go down in shame every couple of months is probably Google. I can't remember the last time Gmail was down. It just works! If google is down, probably your internet is down. Their expertise and discipline in distributed applications is unrivaled. I'm guessing because they have datacenters everywhere with huge fat pipes in between, and their SREs are probably top notch who don't take shortcuts. Google gets a whole bunch of things wrong at times, but somethings I gotta say, they've nailed it.
  - 8y ago
nixgeek 8y ago
Despite having a vote increment velocity far exceeding other items, a publish time of only 25 minutes ago, and more points, this item just dropped from #5 to #7 on the front page. How’s that work exactly? Edit: It’s now droppped to #14 even with comment count also rapidly increasing.
- maxerickson 8y ago
  Comment count is a factor. edit: it's a negative factor...
  - nixgeek 8y ago
    Thanks for the clarity, this makes more sense now!
- rattray 8y ago
  Hmm, it's now off the front page entirely, which seems strange. I don't see much incendiary commenting or similar... @dang, care to comment?
- _wmd 8y ago
  300 comments in one hour will definitely kill it. HN penalizes controversy, which it uses comment count as a proxy for. It works well most of the time
- calcifer 8y ago
  Quoting myself from 8 months ago [1]: > I really don't understand these types of questions. The possible answers range from "because the ranking works that way" to "someone with privileges wanted it that way". On either end of the spectrum, the real question remains: so what? What difference does it make why a particular post is in a particular position? If the title seems interesting, you click on it. If not, you move on. > I don't mean to question you in particular. It just seems like such a trivial concern to me that I truly can't understand why someone might possibly care. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15576036 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15576036
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
r1ch 8y ago
Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but "We've received word that all workspaces are having troubles connecting to Slack." makes it sound like their internal monitoring didn't catch whatever is causing this. I was personally experiencing issues for about 20-30 minutes before the status update was posted.
- bsiemon 8y ago
  I think that is just the tongue in cheek language they like to use.
  - Dirlewanger 8y ago
    Yeah, it's really funny and ironic when you cost customers money!
- joobus 8y ago
  Their subsequent update makes it sound like they still don't have a clue. > Our team is still looking into the cause of the connectivity issues, and we'll continue to update you on our progress.
- raphaelj 8y ago
  We started having issues connecting to Slack 4 hours before they reported a status.
- parliament32 8y ago
  Pretty much every time there's a slack outage it takes them a solid 20 minutes to update their status page. Several times I've emailed them 10 minutes into an outage (following "nobody at the office can reach slack, but their status page says smooth sailing, we should do more diagnostics in case it's office internet or something..."), then gotten a response 10 minutes later to the tune of "we're aware, we just updated our status page, go look at that". I think they consider updating their status page a PR problem, so they avoid if if the issue can be fixed in under X minutes. Which also makes their uptime totals completely bogus.
coldcode 8y ago
This is why I like working on iOS apps, if all hell breaks lose I can't do anything. When something like Slack goes belly up, imagine those poor folks having to respond.
fsiefken 8y ago
for a decentralized alternative: https://matrix.org/blog/home/ https://matrix.org/blog/home/
- Theodores 8y ago
  They have too many 'decentralized', i.e. blockchain, things on their landing page for my liking. However, since blockchain 'technologies' are the wonder kool-aid for everything and given that messaging 'apps' are trivial compared to rocket surgery, how come that there isn't a messaging app that is decentralised with these wonder technologies, were it only costs you a few cryptokitties to get your messages and where you earn a few dogecoin to forward on other peoples messages?
  - detaro 8y ago
    Just to be clear, the Matrix protocol and technology does not involve Blockchains in any way.
raphaelj 8y ago
Does anyone know about any Slack alternatives that support bots, GIFYs and emojis ? And above all that is not ridiculously slow.
- detaro 8y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17408147 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17408147
- Jgrubb 8y ago
  We just spun up Mattermost, seems ok for the first hour.
- sahaskatta 8y ago
  There's Google Chat if you use G Suite like us. https://chat.google.com/welcome https://chat.google.com/welcome Or Atlassian's Stride is really great too: https://www.stride.com/ https://www.stride.com/ If your org happens to be part of the Microsoft Office 365 ecosystem, there's Microsoft Teams. All of the products support bots, gifys, and emojis. I personally think Google Chat and Stride are much faster than slack too. I haven't tried Microsoft Teams yet.
sammorrowdrums 8y ago
Surely some of the Slack team are hiding on here? Any idea what's going on? ;)
- ufmace 8y ago
  If they are, I sure hope they're doing something more productive than surfing HN
  - sammorrowdrums 8y ago
    Very much agreed. I meant it as a tongue in cheek comment. I am however deeply disappointed by the vague and useless updates on https://status.slack.com/2018-06/142edcb9e52c7663 https://status.slack.com/2018-06/142edcb9e52c7663 They might as well have written: - nope but maybe at some point a yep - still nope - nope - nope ... I know many companies don't like to give details in the heat of the moment (and the engineers that understand are likely working on it), so I really do hope they give us a good retro after it's all over.
castis 8y ago
It's interesting to me that the update messages are posted every 30 minutes from 1st notification until resolution. Judging by this and every other outage I assume this is automatic, and probably implemented to appease the people who are probably frustrated by the outage. https://status.slack.com/2018-06/142edcb9e52c7663 https://status.slack.com/2018-06/142edcb9e52c7663
- switch007 8y ago
  We have a similar policy at $WORK (but manual). In our experience customers go mental if you say absolutely nothing.
- patrickxb 8y ago
  Good catch...definitely updating every 30 minutes exactly.
- parliament32 8y ago
  There is also zero information in those statuses, which kinda defeats the purpose. Might as well just have the status landing page with no details.
abdullahdiaa 8y ago
It's really disappointing to get this update after ~2 hours of downtime > We have no new information to share just yet, but we're continuing our efforts. Your patience is truly appreciated. https://status.slack.com/2018-06/142edcb9e52c7663 https://status.slack.com/2018-06/142edcb9e52c7663
saudioger 8y ago
That's a lot of eggs in their basket. A major downside of the current way a lot of these companies work is that there's a huge incentive for them to never allow customers to self-host their product.
coldcode 8y ago
Still no work on the cause or fixes after 90 minutes. I wonder what kind of problem this could be.
chatmasta 8y ago
This is a weird outage... - I am in UK - I had similar problems last night (around 2AM GMT) but status.slack.com was all green, and my colleagues in the US seemed to be using it okay - Currently it's completely down on desktop for me (waiting to reconnect...) - Connecting through a US VPN does not resolve the problem on Desktop, even though my US colleagues are using it on Desktop successfully right now - Mobile works for receiving and sending messages, but there is a delay Anyone else seeing symptoms like this?
buryat 8y ago
give them some slack guys
smpetrey 8y ago
Yikes. This one looks like a doozy. Herre's to hoping there's a post mortem this time around.
nopriorarrests 8y ago
Downtimes happen, I get it, but this one lasts for 3+ hours already. Can't even remember the previous time when such a large service was down for so long.
dannyrosen 8y ago
Hope Slack considers doing a post-mortem similar to Gitlab[1]. Sharing what they learned and giving customers context is appreciated. [1]: https://about.gitlab.com/2017/02/10/postmortem-of-database-outage-of-january-31/ https://about.gitlab.com/2017/02/10/postmortem-of-database-o...
- trcollinson 8y ago
  Yes, that way we can beat them up for years to come based on whatever mistake they made. It would be even better if they told us which employee made the mistake so we can incessantly mock that employee openly and publicly every time Slack is ever mentioned on HN. When GitHub was purchased by Microsoft, Gitlab came up quite a bit and we got to rehash that whole database outage over again many times over those few days. It was sad. If it were my company, I would say a little as humanly possible.
  - coryfklein 8y ago
    It's not about assigning blame, it's about sharing lessons learned with the broader community and being transparent and honest with paying customers about issues that may have significant impact on downstream productivity.
    - trcollinson 8y ago
      I entirely understand what you are saying, believe me I do. But that is not the way some communities take it. We still see messages like "You could move to Gitlab but... you know they dropped their production database a couple of years back? Use them at your own risk!" We learned a lot from the Gitlab outage. It was a simple mistake and not one they will have again, yet people still beat them up for it. I'm not sure the value is there for the company to be super open about their outages and issues.
      - calcifer 8y ago
        On the contrary, I would trust them quite a bit less, not more, if they had an hours long outage without any explanation.
pi-squared 8y ago
Telegram was having an outage at about the same time, probably unrelated but still: http://downdetector.com/status/telegram http://downdetector.com/status/telegram
sulami 8y ago
My team jumped onto IRC, which is working pretty well. No custom emoji, but that's about it.
- spraak 8y ago
  Do you run your own server?
EamonnMR 8y ago
This might be the longest downtime I've ever seen for Slack.
IloveHN84 8y ago
I imagine people felt more productive today without Slack
VectorLock 8y ago
Relaxing morning off on humpday!
7ewis 8y ago
Just as we sign a £100K+/annum contact with them... At least it happened before we've migrated.
- swozey 8y ago
  There are so many open source solutions, Mattermost, Rocketchat, etc, why are companies willing to pay $100k/yr for Slack? What was the defining feature that others didn't have? Even Discord feels like it has far more features than Slack.
  - snom380 8y ago
    There may not be one defining feature. For some it may be look and feel/attention to detail. It could be the number of well supported Slack integrations, or various enterprise features wrt message retention and deletion, SSO and auditing.
  - iv597 8y ago
    Name recognition, employee familiarity (I've used Slack at every job I've worked since early 2015, I pretty much know what to expect from it always), and punting maintenance costs (this is probably the biggest factor). I love IRC and XMPP. I'd love to run one of those, or some new service (Matrix?), at work. However, my time is arguably better spent doing anything _other_ than maintaining such services, and the same goes for most engineers at most companies, sadly. Side factor: the mobile clients for IRC and XMPP almost universally suck, at least on Android. I imagine if those problems had been solved in a reliable way, more companies may consider them (assuming the allocation of engineering resources problem isn't a problem).
evan_ 8y ago
back up for me.
l1n 8y ago
Back online here.
- Varcht 8y ago
  Here too
foxylion 8y ago
I wonder who is writing those status messages. as a customer this reads like "please wait, ETA to fix unknown" in 10 different ways.
james_pm 8y ago
While I appreciate the timely status updates, it almost seems like Slack has built a random status update bot to post updates that don't say anything exactly every 30 minutes. https://status.slack.com/2018-06/142edcb9e52c7663 https://status.slack.com/2018-06/142edcb9e52c7663
vanni 8y ago
Slack and Chromecast having an almost simultaneous worlwide outage... have they something in common? Same enemies? https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=chromecast%20slack https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=chromecast%20slack https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/27/google-home-and-chromecast-are-down-affecting-users-worldwide/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/27/google-home-and-chromecast...
macintux 8y ago
Fixed, but their status page is rather optimistically reporting 100% uptime this month.
parliament32 8y ago
Seems to be fixed... with zero info on their status page about what went wrong or otherwise. >We're happy to report that workspaces should be able to connect again, as we've isolated the problem. Some folks may need to refresh (Ctrl + R or Cmd + R). If you're still experiencing issues, please drop us a line Hilariously, their "uptime in the last 30 days" still shows 100%.

468 points by abdullahdiaa 8y ago

The issue I'm having is that I can't send messages. Reading them is fine. The dashboards on the walls at SlackHQ must be pretty interesting right now.

geerlingguy 8y ago
Yeah, a strange failure mode; I was even notified of a new message a few minutes ago, but couldn't post a reply.
bshimmin 8y ago
If you want to stop being able to receive them as well, just hit reload (then you won't be able to reconnect).

tapoxi 8y ago

It's times like this I wish there was a solid decentralized standard to pick from, but there's no clear choice between XMPP and Matrix.

alexkavon 8y ago
Create a new one![0] [0] https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
rkeene2 8y ago
There's always IRC ;-)
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- samuell 8y ago
  IRC is actually viable, with https://riot.im https://riot.im for offline logging and mobile access.
dielan 8y ago
Matrix is my preference for sure. It's fresh and exciting. While XMPP is harder to talk people into trying
- edhelas 8y ago
  If you are interested we are building a communication platform for communities fully based on XMPP https://movim.eu/ https://movim.eu/ :) It can easily be deployed on a Web server.
- cbm-vic-20 8y ago
  Their site (https://matrix.org https://matrix.org) reeks of hype-oriented engineering. From the most cursory overview of their home page, their decentralization looks a lot like IRC peering.
  - dijit 8y ago
    The federation elements actually work pretty well, more similar to XMPP than IRC.
mynewtb 8y ago
Zulip is amazing, is a self hosted system without federation is an option for you.
- tomstockmail 8y ago
  Love the workflow with Zulip, but I hope they work out a way to join in with either Matrix or IRC3+ federation.
sanderjd 8y ago
It's not about the protocols, it's about having a client with a user experience that is acceptable to an entire company rather than just a team of engineers. Which decentralized protocol has such a client? (Speaking as someone who got burned trying to advocate for IRC at a company that eventually and inevitably switched to Slack.)
- tapoxi 8y ago
  There's plenty of decent XMPP clients, like Spark (https://igniterealtime.org/projects/spark/ https://igniterealtime.org/projects/spark/) but they'd take an IT team to configure. Matrix has Riot (https://riot.im/app https://riot.im/app) but personally I find it incredibly confusing.
  - sanderjd 8y ago
    I'll have to take a look at Spark. I don't think it's a problem if something needs to be initially deployed and configured by an IT department (or otherwise tech savvy individual or group), as long as its onboarding and primary usage flows are straightforward. An arbitrary non-tech-savvy but internet-familiar employee needs to be able to create an account, browse and join rooms, and search through history without any hand-holding. Slack and its direct competitors pass this test. IRC doesn't. Does Spark?
    - tapoxi 8y ago
      It's certainly the closest of all XMPP clients I've used, since it has a very friendly interface. Their related Openfire XMPP server is also targeted at internal deployments and is very easy to configure with a web UI.
- ummonk 8y ago
  Curious why you got burned with IRC client UX given the multitude of clients available for it.
  - swozey 8y ago
kirbypineapple 8y ago
We use Slack for everyday company wide communication/ announcements and Riot for encrypted secure communications (you can host Riot yourself): https://about.riot.im/ https://about.riot.im/

sdf43543t345 8y ago

IRC had uptime in the scale of decades. Why are our 2018 solutions so fragile?

microcolonel 8y ago
Because they're single-source, single-point-of-failure (in the case of Slack), and very very very complex.
bonyt 8y ago
I mean, most IRC networks at least have netsplits from time to time.
Waterluvian 8y ago
I recall net splits happening all the time so I'm not sure that ircs uptime was a practical real world "decades".
orf 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netsplit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netsplit
- mirages 8y ago
  Anybody knows why the netsplit was written *.net *.split Why those stars and dots ?
  - whafro 8y ago
    I believe it's an effort to show a netsplit in the traditional form (server1, server2) without placing blame on a particular server. Back when I IRCd regularly (and perhaps this is still the case today), certain servers would get a reputation for splitting more than others, and I think this network (and/or its ircd) decided to mask it without breaking the general format.
  - nexxer 8y ago
    It's to avoid showing the server names to the public on some IRC networks for various reasons including security through (some) obscurity.

drewg123 8y ago

The funny thing is that sending normal messages just times out 90% of the time. But /me comments generate an error after timeout: slackbot9:28 AM /me throws shoe at slack failed with the error "ASSocket: timed out reading 4 bytes from adminserver-3wvr:10443" We've switched to google hangouts as an ad-hoc workaround..

spraak 8y ago

What does Slack as a company use to communicate when Slack the product is down? :>

parliament32 8y ago
Almost definitely IRC, just like Google does. https://landing.google.com/sre/book/chapters/managing-incidents.html https://landing.google.com/sre/book/chapters/managing-incide...

coldseattle 8y ago

And productivity is up!

setquk 8y ago
Can confirm. No wait, the first thing I did was check HN and now am reading this and oh there's another interesting thing.
- shawn 8y ago
  HN's noprocrast setting cures that.
  - pwenzel 8y ago
    It works all too well. This will be my last comment of the day before noprocrast kicks me off HN.
  - setquk 8y ago
    Thank you for pointing this feature out. I had no idea what that flag did.
orf 8y ago
Hacker news can take the... slack.
MiyamotoAkira 8y ago
What productivity? I am here on HN

cimmanom 8y ago

What backup methods of communication are distributed teams using when Slack goes down?

cagrimmett 8y ago
My team uses Voxer threads as backup during times like this. We also use Voxer when it takes too long to type explanations out on Slack.
dev360 8y ago
Message in a bottle
geerlingguy 8y ago
Email, if it's actually important. Then if emergency, you can always hop on IRC, Skype, Messages/SMS, etc.
jekrb 8y ago
Secure Scuttlebutt
- bobx11 8y ago
  Is this a bob reference??
  - bovermyer 8y ago
    https://github.com/ssbc/secure-scuttlebutt https://github.com/ssbc/secure-scuttlebutt
philg_jr 8y ago
IPoAC (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1149)
neuromantik8086 8y ago
My group uses Roman fire signals [1]. [1] http://www.romanobritain.org/8-military/mil_signalling_systems.htm http://www.romanobritain.org/8-military/mil_signalling_syste...

majewsky 8y ago

Even Slack Enterprise is affected. So much about "this runs on your own infrastructure".

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
nixgeek 8y ago
Slack Enterprise has never run on your own infrastructure.
- majewsky 8y ago
  It doesn't? I thought that was its only reason to exist.
  - nixgeek 8y ago
    It’s pitch is a little different, it gives you ‘Workspaces’ which are somewhat connected, and tools to manage big deployments. IBM, Oracle and many large companies use it because 100,000+ participants in one workspace is quite unmanageable. Think channel namespacing whilst unifying user provisioning and enabling DM and MPDM across the entire company. Users can have access to one or many namespaces, they sign in once and it populates all enabled workspaces into that users client. You can share channels between workspace within Enterprise Grid fairly trivially (although this now works between Slack tenancies owned by different companies too!) Still runs on the same infrastructure in AWS as other Slack customers though. From a policy perspective you can push down settings to all Workspaces in your SEG, and define whether you “centrally control” or “delegate to Workspace owners” on a setting by setting basis.

ataturk 8y ago

Wish there was a JIRA outage at my work.

sarreph 8y ago

You know how much of the community uses one messaging system when 15 minutes after it going down, it has over 40 points on the front page! This says a lot about how it's a single point of failure in modern company comms. It's even worrying to think about how some users probably have production-dependent (dare I postulate it) workflows in Slack that get crippled by its outage... ITT: Chat about decentralisation that will ultimately lead to no action.* *Because we've had this discussion so many times before...

ivm 8y ago
Luckily most of my active communities are on Discord nowadays. It works much faster and even has a dark theme by default.
- asdojasdosadsa 8y ago
  It's lovely how in Slack.app if you want dark theme, you have to modify the internet javascript files...
- rkeene2 8y ago
  But it's not any less centralized, which I think was the complaint, not that it was popular even though this was mentioned.
  - sarreph 8y ago
    > which I think was the complaint Spot on, not that I know anything about Discord's architecture...
- palencharizard 8y ago
  > even has a dark theme by default. I love how having a dark theme is second only to "it works" in terms of how we pick services these days XD
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]

bgribble 8y ago

Maybe unrelated, but my AWS-hosted websockets-using app had an outage starting at the same time. Also a third-party API provider we use for handling inbound phone calls. So this smells like a wider outage than just Slack.

switch007 8y ago
That's interesting. More speculation: they haven't given any detail in 2 hours, perhaps if it's an upstream/3rd-party problem, they haven't been given any info.
- bgribble 8y ago
  I know it's not exactly scientific, but the front page of https://downdetector.com https://downdetector.com shows a number of services that have problem spikes starting anywhere from 3am US/Eastern to 9am US/Eastern and continuing through now (11:24 US/Eastern): Google Home, Fortnite, Exede, Level 3, New York Times, AWS. Maybe totally unrelated to each other, who knows.
  - dawnerd 8y ago
    That certainly does look suspicious there - especially level3.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
kohanz 8y ago
I'm wondering the same thing. I chose this morning to soft-launch my side-project/startup and sent out the sign-up link to my e-mail list. Of course, it's AWS Cognito-based, was working yesterday, but failed for the new users. Great timing! Phone support said they are looking into some outages (even though the status page is all green).
Maxion 8y ago
Telegram was down too just half an hour before slack. Dunno if they run on aws?

amarraja 8y ago

Spare a thought for the chatops crowd who may be blissfully unaware that their own infrastructure is down

neuromantik8086 8y ago
I have little pity for the folks who decided that re-implementing a shell in a chat application was a well-conceived notion.
- amarraja 8y ago
  Hopefully they're learning this lesson. I can just see it now. A company's app is dying from all the timeouts to a slack webhook, however they can't deploy because slack is down.
  - bovermyer 8y ago
    Oh god. Who would have a Slack webhook as a blocking part of their pipeline??
  - yeldarb 8y ago
    It's just login that's not working it seems. I keep getting automated push notifications from our bots (but I still can't connect to the app myself). We use it for things like relaying user-flagged messages to our support team and reminding us when scheduled content has been automatically released.

gsich 8y ago

Thats the problem without self-hosting your essential stuff.

gtsteve 8y ago
I don't see it as too much of a problem so long as you're not one of those teams that orchestrates their deployments using a Slack bot. Just make sure you have an agreed backup mechanism, i.e. Google Hangouts, Zoom, etc.
borplk 8y ago
self-hosting doesn't imply automatic and better uptime than the hosted version. most people are much better off letting dedicated teams of tens of people take care of the hosted version for them.
strunz 8y ago
Funny, our self-hosted infrastructure goes down weekly.
- slenk 8y ago
  No offense, but you're probably doing it wrong
  - FooBarWidget 8y ago
    You just gave a good argument of why s/he should use Slack. Yeah s/he might be doing it wrong, but so what? One should focus on core business, not system administration.
    - Dirlewanger 8y ago
      Yup, every time one of the popular centralized XaaS platforms go down, there's always the snarky "Heh, well my stuff is self-hosted...", and they are always the types that have no idea how to value their time.
8y ago

chrismatheson 8y ago

Skype still up

Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago

If only there were a venerable, decentralized instant messaging system we could use, perhaps some kind of internet relay chat system... </sarcasm> You reap what you sow. Depending on Slack for your communications is a bad idea. I can't even remember the last time any of the IRC networks I frequent had a total outage.

crankylinuxuser 8y ago
Irc left out federation when the spec was crafted in 1984. It was deemed to bandwidth heavy. Jabber/xmpp was a good step in the right direction. Too bad it overused plugins and bad extensions and XML abuse. Would have been loads better had they though far enough in advance.
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  It's not federated, but it is distributed and fault tolerant. The protocol is open and widely implemented and the implementations are mature and stable.
  - peterwwillis 8y ago
    I mean, Slack isn't federated either. I don't know of any chat platforms that are federated except Jabber. edit Gchat and AIM federated in 2011, but AIM is dead now, so...
maxerickson 8y ago
So you are saying people should sow discord?
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  No. People should use IRC.
  - snom380 8y ago
    In practice, all the attempts I've seen at getting a significant number of non-techies in a company to use IRC have failed. At one company, we almost got everyone on Jabber, but it was never used much outside the tech circles. Slack? Everyone is using it and most seem happy about it, and it does a lot more than IRC.

aliljet 8y ago

Are there solid Slack-style self-hosted alternatives? (The gitlab of the slack world, to be clear.)

JeanFred 8y ago
Gitlab itself ships with Mattermost <https://mattermost.com/> https://mattermost.com/> :)
- aliljet 8y ago
  This doesn't look half bad... while slack's down, seems like a pretty optimal chance to try https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server
nullify88 8y ago
We're giving Mattermost a good try now!
nixgeek 8y ago
Mattermost is actually integrated with GitLab - so yes - options do exist. There’s stuff like Rocket Chat and I think Dropbox released one as OSS a while back resultant from an acquihire, but the name escapes me now.
oneneptune 8y ago
Atlassian, the folks behind bitbucket, jira, and (now) trello have a self hosted product: https://www.atlassian.com/software/hipchat https://www.atlassian.com/software/hipchat They also have a Slack alternative, called Stride.
- SteveNuts 8y ago
  Hipchat doesn't exactly have a stellar uptime record either.
- rattray 8y ago
  Has anyone here used Stride? Reviews?

anonu 8y ago

Previous outages: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16108912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16108912 - 5 months ago (longer discussion) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15597461 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15597461 - 7 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15597431 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15597431 - 8 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13811815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13811815 - 1 year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10616743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10616743 - 3 years ago

rileyt 8y ago
There is also this https://status.slack.com/calendar https://status.slack.com/calendar, but they seem to grossly under report the actual downtime... [edit] note that including this outage, they are reporting to have missed their monthly uptime guarantee 3 months in a row.
- dexterdog 8y ago
  Yeah, stripe does the same thing with their status page. I get alerts that they have an outage at least once a week and more often than not it never shows up as anything in their history. Honestly this is my only significant beef with the service and I've been using it for years now with multiple integrations.
nojvek 8y ago
In light of how Slack and other companies haven't been able to get a decent level of uptime, I have to say, the company known to make huge web applications that don't go down in shame every couple of months is probably Google. I can't remember the last time Gmail was down. It just works! If google is down, probably your internet is down. Their expertise and discipline in distributed applications is unrivaled. I'm guessing because they have datacenters everywhere with huge fat pipes in between, and their SREs are probably top notch who don't take shortcuts. Google gets a whole bunch of things wrong at times, but somethings I gotta say, they've nailed it.
- 8y ago

nixgeek 8y ago

Despite having a vote increment velocity far exceeding other items, a publish time of only 25 minutes ago, and more points, this item just dropped from #5 to #7 on the front page. How’s that work exactly? Edit: It’s now droppped to #14 even with comment count also rapidly increasing.

maxerickson 8y ago
Comment count is a factor. edit: it's a negative factor...
- nixgeek 8y ago
  Thanks for the clarity, this makes more sense now!
rattray 8y ago
Hmm, it's now off the front page entirely, which seems strange. I don't see much incendiary commenting or similar... @dang, care to comment?
_wmd 8y ago
300 comments in one hour will definitely kill it. HN penalizes controversy, which it uses comment count as a proxy for. It works well most of the time
calcifer 8y ago
Quoting myself from 8 months ago [1]: > I really don't understand these types of questions. The possible answers range from "because the ranking works that way" to "someone with privileges wanted it that way". On either end of the spectrum, the real question remains: so what? What difference does it make why a particular post is in a particular position? If the title seems interesting, you click on it. If not, you move on. > I don't mean to question you in particular. It just seems like such a trivial concern to me that I truly can't understand why someone might possibly care. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15576036 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15576036

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

r1ch 8y ago

Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but "We've received word that all workspaces are having troubles connecting to Slack." makes it sound like their internal monitoring didn't catch whatever is causing this. I was personally experiencing issues for about 20-30 minutes before the status update was posted.

bsiemon 8y ago
I think that is just the tongue in cheek language they like to use.
- Dirlewanger 8y ago
  Yeah, it's really funny and ironic when you cost customers money!
joobus 8y ago
Their subsequent update makes it sound like they still don't have a clue. > Our team is still looking into the cause of the connectivity issues, and we'll continue to update you on our progress.
raphaelj 8y ago
We started having issues connecting to Slack 4 hours before they reported a status.
parliament32 8y ago
Pretty much every time there's a slack outage it takes them a solid 20 minutes to update their status page. Several times I've emailed them 10 minutes into an outage (following "nobody at the office can reach slack, but their status page says smooth sailing, we should do more diagnostics in case it's office internet or something..."), then gotten a response 10 minutes later to the tune of "we're aware, we just updated our status page, go look at that". I think they consider updating their status page a PR problem, so they avoid if if the issue can be fixed in under X minutes. Which also makes their uptime totals completely bogus.

coldcode 8y ago

This is why I like working on iOS apps, if all hell breaks lose I can't do anything. When something like Slack goes belly up, imagine those poor folks having to respond.

fsiefken 8y ago

for a decentralized alternative: https://matrix.org/blog/home/ https://matrix.org/blog/home/

Theodores 8y ago
They have too many 'decentralized', i.e. blockchain, things on their landing page for my liking. However, since blockchain 'technologies' are the wonder kool-aid for everything and given that messaging 'apps' are trivial compared to rocket surgery, how come that there isn't a messaging app that is decentralised with these wonder technologies, were it only costs you a few cryptokitties to get your messages and where you earn a few dogecoin to forward on other peoples messages?
- detaro 8y ago
  Just to be clear, the Matrix protocol and technology does not involve Blockchains in any way.

raphaelj 8y ago

Does anyone know about any Slack alternatives that support bots, GIFYs and emojis ? And above all that is not ridiculously slow.

detaro 8y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17408147 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17408147
Jgrubb 8y ago
We just spun up Mattermost, seems ok for the first hour.
sahaskatta 8y ago
There's Google Chat if you use G Suite like us. https://chat.google.com/welcome https://chat.google.com/welcome Or Atlassian's Stride is really great too: https://www.stride.com/ https://www.stride.com/ If your org happens to be part of the Microsoft Office 365 ecosystem, there's Microsoft Teams. All of the products support bots, gifys, and emojis. I personally think Google Chat and Stride are much faster than slack too. I haven't tried Microsoft Teams yet.

sammorrowdrums 8y ago

Surely some of the Slack team are hiding on here? Any idea what's going on? ;)

ufmace 8y ago
If they are, I sure hope they're doing something more productive than surfing HN
- sammorrowdrums 8y ago
  Very much agreed. I meant it as a tongue in cheek comment. I am however deeply disappointed by the vague and useless updates on https://status.slack.com/2018-06/142edcb9e52c7663 https://status.slack.com/2018-06/142edcb9e52c7663 They might as well have written: - nope but maybe at some point a yep - still nope - nope - nope ... I know many companies don't like to give details in the heat of the moment (and the engineers that understand are likely working on it), so I really do hope they give us a good retro after it's all over.

castis 8y ago

It's interesting to me that the update messages are posted every 30 minutes from 1st notification until resolution. Judging by this and every other outage I assume this is automatic, and probably implemented to appease the people who are probably frustrated by the outage. https://status.slack.com/2018-06/142edcb9e52c7663 https://status.slack.com/2018-06/142edcb9e52c7663

switch007 8y ago
We have a similar policy at $WORK (but manual). In our experience customers go mental if you say absolutely nothing.
patrickxb 8y ago
Good catch...definitely updating every 30 minutes exactly.
parliament32 8y ago
There is also zero information in those statuses, which kinda defeats the purpose. Might as well just have the status landing page with no details.

abdullahdiaa 8y ago

It's really disappointing to get this update after ~2 hours of downtime > We have no new information to share just yet, but we're continuing our efforts. Your patience is truly appreciated. https://status.slack.com/2018-06/142edcb9e52c7663 https://status.slack.com/2018-06/142edcb9e52c7663

saudioger 8y ago

That's a lot of eggs in their basket. A major downside of the current way a lot of these companies work is that there's a huge incentive for them to never allow customers to self-host their product.

coldcode 8y ago

Still no work on the cause or fixes after 90 minutes. I wonder what kind of problem this could be.

chatmasta 8y ago

This is a weird outage... - I am in UK - I had similar problems last night (around 2AM GMT) but status.slack.com was all green, and my colleagues in the US seemed to be using it okay - Currently it's completely down on desktop for me (waiting to reconnect...) - Connecting through a US VPN does not resolve the problem on Desktop, even though my US colleagues are using it on Desktop successfully right now - Mobile works for receiving and sending messages, but there is a delay Anyone else seeing symptoms like this?

buryat 8y ago

give them some slack guys

smpetrey 8y ago

Yikes. This one looks like a doozy. Herre's to hoping there's a post mortem this time around.

nopriorarrests 8y ago

Downtimes happen, I get it, but this one lasts for 3+ hours already. Can't even remember the previous time when such a large service was down for so long.

dannyrosen 8y ago

Hope Slack considers doing a post-mortem similar to Gitlab[1]. Sharing what they learned and giving customers context is appreciated. [1]: https://about.gitlab.com/2017/02/10/postmortem-of-database-outage-of-january-31/ https://about.gitlab.com/2017/02/10/postmortem-of-database-o...

trcollinson 8y ago
Yes, that way we can beat them up for years to come based on whatever mistake they made. It would be even better if they told us which employee made the mistake so we can incessantly mock that employee openly and publicly every time Slack is ever mentioned on HN. When GitHub was purchased by Microsoft, Gitlab came up quite a bit and we got to rehash that whole database outage over again many times over those few days. It was sad. If it were my company, I would say a little as humanly possible.
- coryfklein 8y ago
  It's not about assigning blame, it's about sharing lessons learned with the broader community and being transparent and honest with paying customers about issues that may have significant impact on downstream productivity.
  - trcollinson 8y ago
    I entirely understand what you are saying, believe me I do. But that is not the way some communities take it. We still see messages like "You could move to Gitlab but... you know they dropped their production database a couple of years back? Use them at your own risk!" We learned a lot from the Gitlab outage. It was a simple mistake and not one they will have again, yet people still beat them up for it. I'm not sure the value is there for the company to be super open about their outages and issues.
    - calcifer 8y ago
      On the contrary, I would trust them quite a bit less, not more, if they had an hours long outage without any explanation.

pi-squared 8y ago

Telegram was having an outage at about the same time, probably unrelated but still: http://downdetector.com/status/telegram http://downdetector.com/status/telegram

sulami 8y ago

My team jumped onto IRC, which is working pretty well. No custom emoji, but that's about it.

spraak 8y ago
Do you run your own server?

EamonnMR 8y ago

This might be the longest downtime I've ever seen for Slack.

IloveHN84 8y ago

I imagine people felt more productive today without Slack

VectorLock 8y ago

Relaxing morning off on humpday!

7ewis 8y ago

Just as we sign a £100K+/annum contact with them... At least it happened before we've migrated.

swozey 8y ago
There are so many open source solutions, Mattermost, Rocketchat, etc, why are companies willing to pay $100k/yr for Slack? What was the defining feature that others didn't have? Even Discord feels like it has far more features than Slack.
- snom380 8y ago
  There may not be one defining feature. For some it may be look and feel/attention to detail. It could be the number of well supported Slack integrations, or various enterprise features wrt message retention and deletion, SSO and auditing.
- iv597 8y ago
  Name recognition, employee familiarity (I've used Slack at every job I've worked since early 2015, I pretty much know what to expect from it always), and punting maintenance costs (this is probably the biggest factor). I love IRC and XMPP. I'd love to run one of those, or some new service (Matrix?), at work. However, my time is arguably better spent doing anything _other_ than maintaining such services, and the same goes for most engineers at most companies, sadly. Side factor: the mobile clients for IRC and XMPP almost universally suck, at least on Android. I imagine if those problems had been solved in a reliable way, more companies may consider them (assuming the allocation of engineering resources problem isn't a problem).

evan_ 8y ago

back up for me.

l1n 8y ago

Back online here.

Varcht 8y ago
Here too

foxylion 8y ago

I wonder who is writing those status messages. as a customer this reads like "please wait, ETA to fix unknown" in 10 different ways.

james_pm 8y ago

While I appreciate the timely status updates, it almost seems like Slack has built a random status update bot to post updates that don't say anything exactly every 30 minutes. https://status.slack.com/2018-06/142edcb9e52c7663 https://status.slack.com/2018-06/142edcb9e52c7663

vanni 8y ago

Slack and Chromecast having an almost simultaneous worlwide outage... have they something in common? Same enemies? https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=chromecast%20slack https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&q=chromecast%20slack https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/27/google-home-and-chromecast-are-down-affecting-users-worldwide/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/27/google-home-and-chromecast...

macintux 8y ago

Fixed, but their status page is rather optimistically reporting 100% uptime this month.

parliament32 8y ago

Seems to be fixed... with zero info on their status page about what went wrong or otherwise. >We're happy to report that workspaces should be able to connect again, as we've isolated the problem. Some folks may need to refresh (Ctrl + R or Cmd + R). If you're still experiencing issues, please drop us a line Hilariously, their "uptime in the last 30 days" still shows 100%.