5 ms·

I really don't like the heavy dependence on Slack that my (and a lot of other) company has. The outage is frustrating.

by chasedehan 7y ago

Four8Five 7y ago
You can apply the same logic to email and the internet in general.
- derwiki 7y ago
  Comparing one proprietary service to federated and open services? I'm not following you
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - runn1ng 7y ago
    Mailservers 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 ago
    While 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.
    - jedberg 7y ago
      Except that email has built in retries and feedback. Also it's expected to be async, so if a server is down for an hour, most people don't even notice.
    - mr__y 7y ago
      > email has built in retries and feedback Yes it has and it is a great thing - hopefully no messages would be lost assuming that downtime is relatively short. This still does pose a (possibly minor) problem when some mails are urgent.
  - freehunter 7y ago
    It doesn't really matter how open and federated email is if all mail in/out of your mailbox has to go through one provider. If my company's Exchange server went down, email would stop. Likewise for Internet service... if my local AT&T connection went down, it doesn't matter how open and resilient the Internet is, I'm not getting online until it's fixed.
    - Angostura 7y ago
      > f my local AT&T connection went down, it doesn't matter how open and resilient the Internet is, I'm not getting online until it's fixed. Except that you could work from home, check your e-mail using mobile.
    - andoma 7y ago
      When this happens I just switch to tethering from my cell phone. Redundant enough.
      - freehunter 7y ago
        So when Slack is down, just text your coworkers. Problem solved.
    - mr__y 7y ago
      I used to work for a relatively small dev-shop (9 persons) and we had two independent internet connections from two providers to avoid such problems. This was because done that way because there was only one fiber provider that wasn't really reliable (3+ hours downtimes every 1-2 months) and mobile tethering wasn't really an option as well because of nearby powerlines that made the reception quite a problem - to the point where our sales guy had to go outside the building during some calls. Luckily there was a second ISP - not really fast (10mbps was the best they could do) and quite expensive (we've paid more than twice more for that 10mbps than for a gigabit fiber), but still cheaper than having 9 people not able to work while waiting for the "main" ISP to solve their problems.
- drewcoo 7y ago
  No, Slack is more like sunlight, which also exhibits a single point of failure for most orgs. While the sun does go down, it somehow seems more reliable.
  - chefandy 7y ago
    > Slack is more like sunlight Yep. It's pleasant at first and a genuinely useful tool when used correctly, but if you're not judicious with your usage, you could get burned.
testplzignore 7y ago
This is the first Slack outage where it's really affected me. My team has gone all-in on Slack as our communication mechanism. Though now I get to walk around and talk to people in person, so it's not all bad.
freehunter 7y ago
See, I love it. I work for a mostly-remote company and before Slack we had an IM product but it was a 1:1 chat. Having an always-on chat room for the entire team, knowing other teams use the same product and I can pop into their chat room, spinning up channels for project teams, etc. It's been a huge boost to our company. And since so many companies have settled on the same solution, when I'm working with a client I can join their Slack workspace too. That cuts down on the numerous quick phone calls and long email threads that we used to have. Slack vs Teams vs IRC vs anything else, I don't care. It's not about the product. But my company (and most of our clients) didn't have this capability before Slack even though IRC existed for decades, so I'm going to give Slack some credit.
- mr__y 7y ago
  It seems that you could take any old-school internet tech, add some flashy GUI, slap "for enterprise" label and you get a great and popular solution that solves the problem noone ever could solve. Maybe it's time for gopher for enterprise
  - freehunter 7y ago
    That's really what it comes down to. Email existed forever, but no one really liked it until Gmail made it flashy. Smartphones existed forever but no one really liked them until Apple/Google made them flashy. Search existed forever but no one really liked it until Google made it flashy. Hackers like to pretend that presentation doesn't matter, but in the end presentation is the only thing that matters.
    - rocky1138 7y ago
      Sorry, you are wrong. This is pure revisionism. Blackberry was absolutely massive before the iPhone, email has always been the largest use of the internet (until media became possible), and Google search became successful because it actually worked, unlike everything available at the time. I do agree with your sentiment, though. To the user, the UI is the product.
conradfr 7y ago
My deploy on our staging environment fails because the bot can't post the deployment status update on Slack, so yeah, there's that.
- jdormit 7y ago
  ...sounds like you need to revisit your CI pipeline. Your build shouldn't fail when your chat tool is down.
  - conradfr 7y ago
    Yep, made a ticket about it :)
    - Slartie 7y ago
      Sure that didn't fail too because its creation could not be announced on Slack? ;-)
      - conradfr 7y ago
        That's funny because we used to have a Zendesk Slack bot to open tickets but it's broken nowadays.

I really don't like the heavy dependence on Slack that my (and a lot of other) company has. The outage is frustrating.

Four8Five 7y ago

You can apply the same logic to email and the internet in general.

derwiki 7y ago
Comparing one proprietary service to federated and open services? I'm not following you
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- runn1ng 7y ago
  Mailservers 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 ago
  While 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.
  - jedberg 7y ago
    Except that email has built in retries and feedback. Also it's expected to be async, so if a server is down for an hour, most people don't even notice.
  - mr__y 7y ago
    > email has built in retries and feedback Yes it has and it is a great thing - hopefully no messages would be lost assuming that downtime is relatively short. This still does pose a (possibly minor) problem when some mails are urgent.
- freehunter 7y ago
  It doesn't really matter how open and federated email is if all mail in/out of your mailbox has to go through one provider. If my company's Exchange server went down, email would stop. Likewise for Internet service... if my local AT&T connection went down, it doesn't matter how open and resilient the Internet is, I'm not getting online until it's fixed.
  - Angostura 7y ago
    > f my local AT&T connection went down, it doesn't matter how open and resilient the Internet is, I'm not getting online until it's fixed. Except that you could work from home, check your e-mail using mobile.
  - andoma 7y ago
    When this happens I just switch to tethering from my cell phone. Redundant enough.
    - freehunter 7y ago
      So when Slack is down, just text your coworkers. Problem solved.
  - mr__y 7y ago
    I used to work for a relatively small dev-shop (9 persons) and we had two independent internet connections from two providers to avoid such problems. This was because done that way because there was only one fiber provider that wasn't really reliable (3+ hours downtimes every 1-2 months) and mobile tethering wasn't really an option as well because of nearby powerlines that made the reception quite a problem - to the point where our sales guy had to go outside the building during some calls. Luckily there was a second ISP - not really fast (10mbps was the best they could do) and quite expensive (we've paid more than twice more for that 10mbps than for a gigabit fiber), but still cheaper than having 9 people not able to work while waiting for the "main" ISP to solve their problems.
drewcoo 7y ago
No, Slack is more like sunlight, which also exhibits a single point of failure for most orgs. While the sun does go down, it somehow seems more reliable.
- chefandy 7y ago
  > Slack is more like sunlight Yep. It's pleasant at first and a genuinely useful tool when used correctly, but if you're not judicious with your usage, you could get burned.

testplzignore 7y ago

This is the first Slack outage where it's really affected me. My team has gone all-in on Slack as our communication mechanism. Though now I get to walk around and talk to people in person, so it's not all bad.

freehunter 7y ago

See, I love it. I work for a mostly-remote company and before Slack we had an IM product but it was a 1:1 chat. Having an always-on chat room for the entire team, knowing other teams use the same product and I can pop into their chat room, spinning up channels for project teams, etc. It's been a huge boost to our company. And since so many companies have settled on the same solution, when I'm working with a client I can join their Slack workspace too. That cuts down on the numerous quick phone calls and long email threads that we used to have. Slack vs Teams vs IRC vs anything else, I don't care. It's not about the product. But my company (and most of our clients) didn't have this capability before Slack even though IRC existed for decades, so I'm going to give Slack some credit.

mr__y 7y ago
It seems that you could take any old-school internet tech, add some flashy GUI, slap "for enterprise" label and you get a great and popular solution that solves the problem noone ever could solve. Maybe it's time for gopher for enterprise
- freehunter 7y ago
  That's really what it comes down to. Email existed forever, but no one really liked it until Gmail made it flashy. Smartphones existed forever but no one really liked them until Apple/Google made them flashy. Search existed forever but no one really liked it until Google made it flashy. Hackers like to pretend that presentation doesn't matter, but in the end presentation is the only thing that matters.
  - rocky1138 7y ago
    Sorry, you are wrong. This is pure revisionism. Blackberry was absolutely massive before the iPhone, email has always been the largest use of the internet (until media became possible), and Google search became successful because it actually worked, unlike everything available at the time. I do agree with your sentiment, though. To the user, the UI is the product.

conradfr 7y ago

My deploy on our staging environment fails because the bot can't post the deployment status update on Slack, so yeah, there's that.

jdormit 7y ago
...sounds like you need to revisit your CI pipeline. Your build shouldn't fail when your chat tool is down.
- conradfr 7y ago
  Yep, made a ticket about it :)
  - Slartie 7y ago
    Sure that didn't fail too because its creation could not be announced on Slack? ;-)
    - conradfr 7y ago
      That's funny because we used to have a Zendesk Slack bot to open tickets but it's broken nowadays.