7 ms·

How many more outages until all trust is eroded and competing services differentiate themselves on the basis of uptime?

by schoolornot 6y ago

ceejayoz 6y ago
I wouldn't be shocked if businesses saw increased productivity during these.
- falcolas 6y ago
  Not all - many workflows these days rely on Slack or its ilk. Benderbot, Jira/etc. connectors, calendar connectors, remote communication/standups, alerting…
- postalrat 6y ago
  I'm sitting here not sure if I should deploy code since most communication with the rest of my team has been cut off.
  - derwiki 6y ago
    If something went awry, and it caused more pain because Slack was down, how would you feel? If you’re missing comms/observability then waiting to deploy seems prudent.
    - dbbk 6y ago
      So the answer is... people should stop working?
      - postalrat 6y ago
        Of course there are other things to do. But the things I had planned for the morning are all being delayed.
      - derwiki 6y ago
        I can't speak for you, but I can: * work on code * update JIRA * complete required trainings * work on my peer reviews (Workday/Okta are up) * review tech specs Deploying is actually a very small part of my job.
- saxonww 6y ago
  I have less of an excuse not to be more personally productive, but I can't help anyone else (easily) if my primary method of communication is down. Not only because it's harder to contact you, but also because it's impossible for you to just ask in a channel and have me notice you. There's also this perverse incentive to Slack all the things. Lots of CI notifications are sent through it. Some org processes are implemented as workflows. There's been talk of how wonderful it would be to hook up tasking and work tracking to slash commands. I and others often use Slack instead of the 'official' tool to video call each other. An outage like this is still really disruptive. It's not like everyone realizes what's going on immediately or at the same time; we have backup tools, but our turn radius is pretty wide. Some of us can't even communicate effectively without memes, too, and backup tools don't have a giphy integration. EDIT: Do your CI integrations fail if Slack can't be contacted? Do those failures fail your pipeline? Whoops!
  - ghostpepper 6y ago
    Particularly on a Monday morning after a holiday, there are tasks that I know I need to be working on but cannot because relevant details were never transposed from slack to our actual work scheduling tools like google docs, jira, etc. and I cannot access Slack history.
- ryanSrich 6y ago
  If you use slack primarily as a water cooler then yes. However, I drive everything through slack - GitHub, linear, calendars, Notion, support emails, etc. I have notifications turned off for every service we use except for slack. This allows me to effectively ignore everything except for slack. These types of outages destroy that workflow for me.
- dbcurtis 6y ago
  Absolutely! Before the holiday shutdown, I Slacked myself a huge reminder list of things to jump on as soon as we started up again, so that I could hit the ground running in the new year. Oh, wait....
Thaxll 6y ago
None because all competing services have some problems at some point.
dijit 6y ago
If you're asking genuinely then I can tell you my experience when I was part of a SaaS shop, though the times have changed a lot and "my metric is not necessarily your metric". But it was roughly "one large impact a month, for six months", with large caveats that upper management for whatever company had to be working with the product during that month. Large companies don't care if X service went out during the night and impacted someone not in their timezone. If the CTO notices that he can't use something with the same regularity that he gets paid, then it doesn't take long for it to stick in their mind. But migrating everything is _so painful_ that the majority of large companies will do anything they can to avoid moving away.
- xibalba 6y ago
  > But migrating everything is _so painful_ This is a key point is the popularity amongst VCs in investing in B2B SaaS. I take their (and your) word for it. But honestly, I don't actually understand this. Why is migration so hard?
  - danpalmer 6y ago
    Medium sized team on Slack. We'd need to move ~60 full time in-house employees, ~10 remote contractors who aren't on other comms channels, ~20 infrequent freelance contributors who may not check messages often, ~5 custom bots and apps, and ~15 3rd party integrations (of which some won't support any given choice of alternative). This is not to mention the fact that half our staff aren't hugely technical, so have actively _learnt_ how to use Slack and it's features around notification control (things that may come "naturally" to the tech-savvy crowd on HN), @-things, bots, etc, and they would need to re-learn a new tool that is going to work in a different way. This would be a substantial effort for us, and we're a small company. Are there ways to materially minimise this cost?
  - f0ff 6y ago
    >Why is migration so hard? Why would anyone make it easy
    - 6y ago
dkdk8283 6y ago
I feel a little good every time Slack has an issue - it has brought social media communications to my otherwise social media free (excluding hn) life.
jrockway 6y ago
I say this every time Slack is down, but they just seem so shady to me. Nobody can connect right now, and their status site says "100% uptime in the last quarter". Maybe it's close to 100%, but it ain't 100%. I think we should push for a metric where "up" means 100% of people that want to use the service are able to use the service. If 1% of users can't send messages, then that should count as a full-blown outage and should start counting against whatever SLA they advertise. The underlying problem here is that apparently everyone lies about uptime, so if you don't, that looks bad to potential customers. I fear that we will have to push for some legal regulation if we want accurate data, and ... people will probably be opposed to that.
- de_Selby 6y ago
  They should at least update the status site to reflect issues currently happening. I was wondering why the link from a Jira wasn't opening in slack, the page eventually timed out and gave me a link to status.slack.com where it told me everything was peachy. Cue me wasting time trying it again because apparently there was no issue with slack..
- nkassis 6y ago
  You'll just end up with no SLA or pay a hefty amount to use services because that's an impossible standard to support for any service of a size like this.
  - scrose 6y ago
    Isn't this the problem? Companies like Slack set SLA's that they only meet by lying about their uptime. It's as good as having no SLA, except you're likely paying a premium based on the SLA they set.
  - jrockway 6y ago
    I'm not demanding 100% uptime, I'm asking that they say "99.94% uptime" when there has been an outage. Honestly, I could live with a 99.50% SLA, if that's what it really was. After today's probably full-day outage, they'd just have to be extra careful for the rest of the year (or pay me money). Kind of sucks when it's 1/4 that you blow your year's SLA budget though.
NewEntryHN 6y ago
You seem to ask the question about the absolute number of outages, whereas uptime is about the number of outages per units of time.

How many more outages until all trust is eroded and competing services differentiate themselves on the basis of uptime?

ceejayoz 6y ago

I wouldn't be shocked if businesses saw increased productivity during these.

falcolas 6y ago
Not all - many workflows these days rely on Slack or its ilk. Benderbot, Jira/etc. connectors, calendar connectors, remote communication/standups, alerting…
postalrat 6y ago
I'm sitting here not sure if I should deploy code since most communication with the rest of my team has been cut off.
- derwiki 6y ago
  If something went awry, and it caused more pain because Slack was down, how would you feel? If you’re missing comms/observability then waiting to deploy seems prudent.
  - dbbk 6y ago
    So the answer is... people should stop working?
    - postalrat 6y ago
      Of course there are other things to do. But the things I had planned for the morning are all being delayed.
    - derwiki 6y ago
      I can't speak for you, but I can: * work on code * update JIRA * complete required trainings * work on my peer reviews (Workday/Okta are up) * review tech specs Deploying is actually a very small part of my job.
saxonww 6y ago
I have less of an excuse not to be more personally productive, but I can't help anyone else (easily) if my primary method of communication is down. Not only because it's harder to contact you, but also because it's impossible for you to just ask in a channel and have me notice you. There's also this perverse incentive to Slack all the things. Lots of CI notifications are sent through it. Some org processes are implemented as workflows. There's been talk of how wonderful it would be to hook up tasking and work tracking to slash commands. I and others often use Slack instead of the 'official' tool to video call each other. An outage like this is still really disruptive. It's not like everyone realizes what's going on immediately or at the same time; we have backup tools, but our turn radius is pretty wide. Some of us can't even communicate effectively without memes, too, and backup tools don't have a giphy integration. EDIT: Do your CI integrations fail if Slack can't be contacted? Do those failures fail your pipeline? Whoops!
- ghostpepper 6y ago
  Particularly on a Monday morning after a holiday, there are tasks that I know I need to be working on but cannot because relevant details were never transposed from slack to our actual work scheduling tools like google docs, jira, etc. and I cannot access Slack history.
ryanSrich 6y ago
If you use slack primarily as a water cooler then yes. However, I drive everything through slack - GitHub, linear, calendars, Notion, support emails, etc. I have notifications turned off for every service we use except for slack. This allows me to effectively ignore everything except for slack. These types of outages destroy that workflow for me.
dbcurtis 6y ago
Absolutely! Before the holiday shutdown, I Slacked myself a huge reminder list of things to jump on as soon as we started up again, so that I could hit the ground running in the new year. Oh, wait....

Thaxll 6y ago

None because all competing services have some problems at some point.

dijit 6y ago

If you're asking genuinely then I can tell you my experience when I was part of a SaaS shop, though the times have changed a lot and "my metric is not necessarily your metric". But it was roughly "one large impact a month, for six months", with large caveats that upper management for whatever company had to be working with the product during that month. Large companies don't care if X service went out during the night and impacted someone not in their timezone. If the CTO notices that he can't use something with the same regularity that he gets paid, then it doesn't take long for it to stick in their mind. But migrating everything is _so painful_ that the majority of large companies will do anything they can to avoid moving away.

xibalba 6y ago
> But migrating everything is _so painful_ This is a key point is the popularity amongst VCs in investing in B2B SaaS. I take their (and your) word for it. But honestly, I don't actually understand this. Why is migration so hard?
- danpalmer 6y ago
  Medium sized team on Slack. We'd need to move ~60 full time in-house employees, ~10 remote contractors who aren't on other comms channels, ~20 infrequent freelance contributors who may not check messages often, ~5 custom bots and apps, and ~15 3rd party integrations (of which some won't support any given choice of alternative). This is not to mention the fact that half our staff aren't hugely technical, so have actively _learnt_ how to use Slack and it's features around notification control (things that may come "naturally" to the tech-savvy crowd on HN), @-things, bots, etc, and they would need to re-learn a new tool that is going to work in a different way. This would be a substantial effort for us, and we're a small company. Are there ways to materially minimise this cost?
- f0ff 6y ago
  >Why is migration so hard? Why would anyone make it easy
  - 6y ago

dkdk8283 6y ago

I feel a little good every time Slack has an issue - it has brought social media communications to my otherwise social media free (excluding hn) life.

jrockway 6y ago

I say this every time Slack is down, but they just seem so shady to me. Nobody can connect right now, and their status site says "100% uptime in the last quarter". Maybe it's close to 100%, but it ain't 100%. I think we should push for a metric where "up" means 100% of people that want to use the service are able to use the service. If 1% of users can't send messages, then that should count as a full-blown outage and should start counting against whatever SLA they advertise. The underlying problem here is that apparently everyone lies about uptime, so if you don't, that looks bad to potential customers. I fear that we will have to push for some legal regulation if we want accurate data, and ... people will probably be opposed to that.

de_Selby 6y ago
They should at least update the status site to reflect issues currently happening. I was wondering why the link from a Jira wasn't opening in slack, the page eventually timed out and gave me a link to status.slack.com where it told me everything was peachy. Cue me wasting time trying it again because apparently there was no issue with slack..
nkassis 6y ago
You'll just end up with no SLA or pay a hefty amount to use services because that's an impossible standard to support for any service of a size like this.
- scrose 6y ago
  Isn't this the problem? Companies like Slack set SLA's that they only meet by lying about their uptime. It's as good as having no SLA, except you're likely paying a premium based on the SLA they set.
- jrockway 6y ago
  I'm not demanding 100% uptime, I'm asking that they say "99.94% uptime" when there has been an outage. Honestly, I could live with a 99.50% SLA, if that's what it really was. After today's probably full-day outage, they'd just have to be extra careful for the rest of the year (or pay me money). Kind of sucks when it's 1/4 that you blow your year's SLA budget though.

NewEntryHN 6y ago

You seem to ask the question about the absolute number of outages, whereas uptime is about the number of outages per units of time.