14 ms·
Slack was down
- black_puppydog 7y agoRAM prices go tumbling
- _asummers 7y agoThe new update was actually _very_ good for my RAM usage. Still a lot for a chat app but significantly less than before.
- black_puppydog 7y agoRAM prices crash
- ianceicys 7y agoYep down here too. https://status.slack.com/2019-07/b31a6510b8caabcc https://status.slack.com/2019-07/b31a6510b8caabcc
- danielecook 7y agoSeems like an open-source self-managed solution would be preferable at this point.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mffnbs 7y agoIn my experience, in-house hosted products have had much more frequent outages than the SAAS alternatives. Then when there is an outage, it's down for hours instead of minutes.
- diegoperini 7y agoMy Android tests on my test device started failing at the same time. Is Slack app's background service flooding my network?
- diegoperini 7y agoRemoving Slack app fixed the issue. Very weird coincidence.
- jbkkd 7y agoMy charger blew the electricity off at the same time. Got back online without slack working, I thought I broke the internet
- diegoperini 7y agoThat's a cool post-mortem story, thanks for contributing!
- jparsons42 7y agoSince we have GSuite at work, figured I'd post my first thread to chat.google.com and imagine that's our plan for #SlackDown. Don't imagine anyone will notice and that life will carry-on. Even created #general ;-)
- aquaticsunset 7y agoIt's a really viable fallback - I did the same thing this morning. The only difference is the team / channel aspect. While Google Chat supports those features, the effort to seamlessly fallover to "backup channels" is harder than DM-type stuff.
- chasedehan 7y agoI really don't like the heavy dependence on Slack that my (and a lot of other) company has. The outage is frustrating.
- Four8Five 7y agoYou can apply the same logic to email and the internet in general.
- derwiki 7y agoComparing one proprietary service to federated and open services? I'm not following you
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- runn1ng 7y agoMailservers are also down very often. When a company switches from their own e-mail server to hosted Google Mail, their uptime improves.
- mr__y 7y agoWhile email as a whole is indeed federated, email service for a single company is usually not, that is you have a single provider and when that provider happens to have technical issues your email might be down. While obviously you could use other provider (or even free email) almost immediately to send emails, you will not be able to receive/access emails that are sent to your primary address/domain until the provider resolves their issues.
- JD557 7y ago>you will not be able to receive/access emails that are sent to your primary address/domain until the provider resolves their issues. You won't be able to receive new e-mails, but if you use a local client like thunderbird, you can still access your old e-mails. With slack down, I can only access the messages that I (luckily) have cached locally.
- ravedave5 7y agoSince twitter went down the other week hackernews is now the primary 'is it down?' news site.
- wglb 7y agoI don't think this is the appropriate forum for "is down" postings. Post-mortems are interesting.
- hombre_fatal 7y agoThey're upvoted because people can't resist making the same tired "see? we are over-reliant on {Slack,Github,Cloudflare,etc}!" comments.
- metamet 7y agoSee, we're over-reliant on HN for making these types of comments!
- sorenn111 7y agoMy favorite are the conspiracy theories as to why the outages are seemingly so close together in this Summer of 2019. All kinds of imaginative reasons abound. My best guess is summer vacation :) it's at least true for my company who was one of the featured outages
- moate 7y agoMy best guess is that "sequencing creates narratives." It's like in baseball, how a player who hits .333 over the season will have 0-10 and 10-10 stretches where he either can't hit everything or demolishes every pitch he sees. You'll often see sports news come up with stories for why this is happening, and most of the time it's just "this is how statistics work". TL;dr- complex systems are complex, and trying to understand them isn't usually possible for outside parties.
- 7y ago
- elwell 7y agoThe recent rise in Slack downtime might be enough to actually cause significant churn.
- JasonFruit 7y agoI propose the hashtag #SlackOff.
- max0563 7y agoIt was funny at first now all this downtime stuff is just ridiculous
- dbbk 7y agoIs downtime ever really funny?
- mradonic 7y agoThis is becoming so often it's embarrassing really. The way it's handled in the app is also not ideal to say the least - only indication that something is wrong is that the text you are trying to send is greyed out.
- derwiki 7y agoWeird, it took me to a status page saying they were having trouble.
- newaccoutnas 7y agoEventually the status bar appears saying they're having an issue.
- mradonic 7y agoHmmmm, I have 3 workspaces, 1 is paid for, and I got this message only in the paid one :D Is it stated in the pricing page that you get better error handling if you pay?
- jeltz 7y agoI didn't get it for either the paid one or the free one so it might be a coincidence.
- yreg 7y agoYep, and from the status message, you can get to Twitter inside the Slack client and read memes directly from Elon Musk's timeline instead of going through your organization's dedicated meme channel.
- resters 7y agoTrue, it's really bad UX that cost me and a coworker each 30 minutes this morning. Nobody expects the backend to be completely reliable, but the client should be trustworthy when it comes to reporting the status of the backend.
- deleted 7y ago
- anaphor 7y agoIf you're a community driven project or organization using Slack, then take a look at https://zulipchat.com/ https://zulipchat.com/ for something that sucks less, and is open source software. I've found it much more pleasant to use and less buggy than Slack.
- RobertDeNiro 7y agoZulip is way better when you have people in many timezones.
- sergiotapia 7y agoIt's not just about chat. It's also about the integration we have set up with many different applications. I'll check this out hopefully it integrates with stuff!
- mikaelmello 7y agoAlternatively, there's also Rocket.Chat, which is also open source, you can self host it or pay for the cloud plans (which have special rates for certain kinds of organizations, such as OSS). https://rocket.chat/ https://rocket.chat/ Disclaimer: I've done a GSoC project with them last year.
- Angostura 7y agoThank you - hadn't come across that one.
- elwell 7y agoBut... we pay managed solutions like Slack so we have 100% uptime...
- SamuelAdams 7y agoActually it's only two nine's, which means Slack can be down for 52 minutes every year. > 1. We purposely made our commitment to the ‘fourth 9’, viz. 99.99% uptime guarantee in contrast to the typical SLAs which tend to offer 99.90%. We believe that extra availability makes a difference: the ‘fourth 9’ is important when your team relies on Slack every day. You need Slack at least 9,999 out of every 10,000 minutes. [1] [1]: https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204113126-Service-Level-Agreements-SLA-#001 https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/204113126-Service-L...
- mr__y 7y agoThere are a lot of such issues recently on many major websites/services. Is it just me or are those more frequent than a few years ago?
- Kovah 7y agoAbsolutely feels like that, if it's true would be a task for DownDetector or similar sites with their datasets. However, this may be the result of increased dependence on centralized services which gain more and more traffic, which is more difficult to handle and even simple Regex rules (see Cloudflare outage recently) can break everything. To be honest, I don't want to ever be in charge of keeping such complex systems online.
- bkq 7y agoI honestly don't know how Slack can tout themselves as the email killer [1], when they seem to have rather consistent downtime. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/style/slack-replace-email-ipo-listing.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/style/slack-replace-email...
- sleepybrett 7y agoI've worked in organizations where exchange is down more than it's up. shrug
- CzarnyZiutek 7y ago"destroy the skynet" john connor
- elwell 7y ago"Some workspaces might be experiencing issues with messages sending and loading." (emphasis mine) Is that marketing-speak to lessen the loss of trust?
- FartyMcFarter 7y agoYou could also have italicized the "messages sending and loading" I think :)
- exothermic 7y agoI think it was actually true- I am signed in to two workspaces -- one paid plan and one free -- and only the latter has been unavailable so far.
- aarbor989 7y agoFor me it was actually the opposite. I was thinking that only paid workspaces were impacted, which would be mildly funny
- quacker 7y agoI know nothing about Slack's infrastructure, but in practice Slack issues affect different workspaces differently. I always imagined that a workspace resides in just one of many "clusters" (at the very least, maybe paid/enterprise vs free are separate?). Just speculation though.
- MiroF 7y agoIt's only down in the US
- dijit 7y agoI’m in Sweden and it was down for me. My workspace is almost exclusively used in Sweden. (Exception being 3 guys in the UK and one guy in the US, who is not an admin or owner)
- PedroBatista 7y agoWell, since ( according to ) Slack is the be all and end all of business communication and killed email, I can only imagine the absolute caos throughout the World that's going on right now. I expect an economic downturn worst than the Depression in the 30's.
- phy6 7y agoDowndetector reporting a lot of AWS complaints simultaneously.
- totaldude87 7y agoNA is all green per -- https://status.aws.amazon.com/ https://status.aws.amazon.com/
- DrWumbo 7y agoWith Slack unable to send messages, I had to contact people via trembles Skype for Business
- throwaway123x2 7y agoI would love it if I could use Skype, but Skype has been consistently crashing on my machine for the last month. And even when it opens, it almost never works correctly.
- aantix 7y agoSlightly offtopic : As a remote engineer, I wonder if half-duplex voice (kind of like a CB radio) would be superior for communication vs typing everything? E.g. when I have an idea, I just talk, that comment is recorded and made available to the chat room. I'd like to get back some of the nuance of language that just isn't possible with text. There'd have to be some easy way of playing back the voice snippets in order that were posted to the chat room. Maybe Discord is superior to Slack for this.. I've never used it.
- davidivadavid 7y agoInteresting to explore, but probably not as good for search/copy pasting, etc. (or it needs to come with automated transcription).
- dudul 7y agoI think it's a terrible idea. Writing things down, is the first step towards really thinking it through, making sure it makes sense, etc.
- aantix 7y agoTrue, when in isolation. I'm thinking more of collaboration - when the solution isn't necessarily known and there's a lot of back and forth.
- e4325f 7y agoThis is very common on WeChat, from what I can tell most people communicate with voice snippets.
- jvagner 7y agoUsed to really like full-duplex voice in Nextel phones eons ago.. it was good for initiation conversations, which would then pull people into whatever chat we needed at the time. Not sure we'd use it the same now, but we were running our own servers at the time, things weren't quite stable yet, and some of us were frequently out of the office. I've wanted to build a proper calling-tree & follow client for Pagerduty (or, own platform) because there's still a need for non-technical notifications in an org where people just won't visit a status page... or when sales/tech support need to know sooner, rather than later, than an environment is suddenly down.
- zzyzxd 7y agoJanuary is the only month that slack didn't have a downtime this year. They must have some serious infrastructure issue.
- olefoo 7y agoUsage climbing as they become a mainstream choice... what we call a "nice problem to have". Of course they do have some funded fast followers now; eager to take on any defecting users.
- artur_makly 7y agowhat also sucks is that they don't offer an 'offline' mode to read existing msgs! (update - this works on IOS but not on the desktop..for me at least)
- mslate 7y agoAny alternatives to Slack with parity screensharing functionality? Being able to draw on the screen is so valuable for remote pair programming—Hangouts/Skype don’t cut it
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y agoI heard about this news on IRC. Can barely remember the last Freenode outage - must have been years ago.
- notnull 7y agoIs it really that hard to spin up an IRC server for moments like these? I too have had to switch to Skype communications today. I wish people used IRC in the first place so I could write my own bots.
- kgraves 7y agoproblem is, non devs don't use IRC.
- komali2 7y agoI've been meaning to figure out how to do this for my office. From what I can understand, setting up the IRC server is easy, making it "secure" is kinda hard, getting slack features like shared history (so you can log out, back in, and see your messages) is fairly hard. I've only done cursory glancing over blogs though. Also I would need to help my coworkers choose and settle on a client. Particularly one for the phone. I used to use androidIRC but I kept getting booted from channels cause when it was in my pocket it would spam connect/disconnects.
- VectorLock 7y agoYou can write bots in Slack. Actually they tout that as a big feature.
- totaldude87 7y agoNow we can put slack into the list of Major league tech companies which cannot keep the services up and running 24/7. Cloudflare Facebook and its group of companies Azure cloud Google Cloud , twitter etc etc AWS, eyes are you now :)
- rocky1138 7y agoS3 went down for nearly an entire workday a few years ago. It legit pretty much broke everything. We all went home because there was no way to do any work.
- balls187 7y agoFunny enough, that S3 outtage busted Slack's file feature.
- totaldude87 7y agooh yeah, Netflix was down along with a loads of companies when aws had its issues, but the list i put out was the ones in last few months ;)
- peterkelly 7y ago... and productivity is up
- duxup 7y agoOne of those frustrating situations where i think my message is sent, but it isn't, and sometimes I'm getting responses and sometimes not. Half failing is way worse than completely failing.
- namelosw 7y agoI remember there's a Slack architecture case study by AWS[0]. I was a little bit surprised that the architecture can hold such huge traffic. As a comparison, Discord use's tech stack is more niche and cutting edge[1], but they seem to know very well what they are doing. It's interesting because AWS use Slack's architecture as a case study because it's a little bit mediocre, that their major potential customers can understand and use. I just don't think AWS will ever use Discord's architecture as a case study... [0] https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/slack/ https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/slack/ [1] https://blog.discordapp.com/scaling-elixir-f9b8e1e7c29b https://blog.discordapp.com/scaling-elixir-f9b8e1e7c29b
- pavanagrawal123 7y agodiscord is also primary on GCP, afaik?
- papln 7y agoWhy hasn't Slack built a P2P fallback for Enterprise teams? Slack server knows at least which clients has recently been active in a chatroom, so the server could send that information to clients (per privacy opt-in) who can then make a best-effort attempt to send their new messages to the recently-active clients. Perhaps that's just self-hosting with extra steps. At some point, isn't it cost-effective to offer customers a SaaSBox that they can deploy as a minimal-functionality on-prem backup to the cloud service?
- lhotkins 7y agoI never really understood how such buggy software can have such crazy high valuation. Seems like just a matter of time before someone does the same thing but better.
- kyberias 7y agoQuick! Analyze whether there was any correlation between number of bugs created (in Github repos, for example) and the Slack downtime.
- papito 7y agoPonder for a second how many bits of sensitive information and competition secrets are right now on Slack.
- 120bits 7y agoI see lot of frustration and alternatives provided for slack. However, I'm genuinely curious about the degree of dependence on slack for team based communication? Do people not use email anymore? We have slack at my company as well and yes it was frustrating, but we have email list. Thing just works. P.S I don't work for slack or have any affiliation.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Rakshith 7y agoI had to reload so many times. I emailed instead
- black_13 7y agoAnd there was much rejoicing.