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I don't think this is the appropriate forum for "is down" postings. Post-mortems are interesting.

by wglb 7y ago

hombre_fatal 7y ago
They're upvoted because people can't resist making the same tired "see? we are over-reliant on {Slack,Github,Cloudflare,etc}!" comments.
- metamet 7y ago
  See, we're over-reliant on HN for making these types of comments!
- sorenn111 7y ago
  My 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 ago
    My 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.
    - Dumblydorr 7y ago
      Not entirely true regarding sports, 538 has done some decent analyses of basketball shooting and found that hot and cold shooting is often true, the same is likely true for baseball. Streaks are naturally occurring, both for randomness and due to other, harder to explain factors.
elwell 7y ago
And yet it is the first place I checked to verify my experience
- wglb 7y ago
  I suggest https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/, slack its own self, or https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/ https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/ or https://hosting.review/check-if-website-is-down/ https://hosting.review/check-if-website-is-down/ or https://www.isitwp.com/uptime-checker/ https://www.isitwp.com/uptime-checker/. No need to fill this site with three or four postings with non-substantial comments.
  - eridius 7y ago
    Sites like that just check if the URL is reachable. They don't have any way of testing for API issues.
    - wglb 7y ago
      Right. HN does neither.
diegoperini 7y ago
It is appropriate if Slack being down affects software other than Slack. We can learn how to avoid outages in our own products happening due to 3rd party services such as Slack becoming unavailable.
- freehunter 7y ago
  I would love if threads like this became "how to make your Slackbots more resilient" or "high-availability messaging by archiving your Slack threads" or an actually interesting conversation topic. Instead of just complaining that Slack is popular and on-premise solutions never have technical problems, I'd love to hear some real solutions.
  - allana 7y ago
    I've been fairly content with Matrix, the ecosystem has improved massively in the last couple months, reducing resource usage on the server I use and adding additional e2e encrypted clients besides Riot. Bridges are also super handy for integrating with IRC, Slack and similar.
lonnyk 7y ago
Agreed

I don't think this is the appropriate forum for "is down" postings. Post-mortems are interesting.

by wglb 7y ago

I don't think this is the appropriate forum for "is down" postings. Post-mortems are interesting.

They're upvoted because people can't resist making the same tired "see? we are over-reliant on {Slack,Github,Cloudflare,etc}!" comments.

metamet 7y ago
See, we're over-reliant on HN for making these types of comments!
sorenn111 7y ago
My 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 ago
  My 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.
  - Dumblydorr 7y ago
    Not entirely true regarding sports, 538 has done some decent analyses of basketball shooting and found that hot and cold shooting is often true, the same is likely true for baseball. Streaks are naturally occurring, both for randomness and due to other, harder to explain factors.

elwell 7y ago

And yet it is the first place I checked to verify my experience

wglb 7y ago
I suggest https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/, slack its own self, or https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/ https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/ or https://hosting.review/check-if-website-is-down/ https://hosting.review/check-if-website-is-down/ or https://www.isitwp.com/uptime-checker/ https://www.isitwp.com/uptime-checker/. No need to fill this site with three or four postings with non-substantial comments.
- eridius 7y ago
  Sites like that just check if the URL is reachable. They don't have any way of testing for API issues.
  - wglb 7y ago
    Right. HN does neither.

diegoperini 7y ago

It is appropriate if Slack being down affects software other than Slack. We can learn how to avoid outages in our own products happening due to 3rd party services such as Slack becoming unavailable.

freehunter 7y ago
I would love if threads like this became "how to make your Slackbots more resilient" or "high-availability messaging by archiving your Slack threads" or an actually interesting conversation topic. Instead of just complaining that Slack is popular and on-premise solutions never have technical problems, I'd love to hear some real solutions.
- allana 7y ago
  I've been fairly content with Matrix, the ecosystem has improved massively in the last couple months, reducing resource usage on the server I use and adding additional e2e encrypted clients besides Riot. Bridges are also super handy for integrating with IRC, Slack and similar.

lonnyk 7y ago

Agreed