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Slack is down for some users
- iso1631 5y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30428142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30428142
- gadrev 5y agoDown for me. Can't use the desktop app or the browser. The app seems normal, but IDK if it's receiving traffic.
- enraged_camel 5y agoDown for some of my accounts, but not others.
- meepmorp 5y agoYeah, my non-SSO accounts seem fine.
- cestith 5y agoThe iPhone app seems to be working fine for me. Web app or "desktop" app neither one are working. It's been more than an hour here.
- bun_at_work 5y agoThis is my experience as well. Running on MacOS 12.2 for desktop app, Firefox for the browser (latest stable version). However, the iPhone version is working just fine.
- throwdbaaway 5y agohttps://status.slack.com/2022-02-22 https://status.slack.com/2022-02-22 has been updated with this: > A configuration change inadvertently lead to a sudden increase in activity on our database infrastructure. Due to this increased activity, the affected databases failed to serve incoming requests to connect to Slack. We introduced tighter rate limits on connection requests to reduce the load on the system. This meant that some people could not access Slack at all, but also that Slack would continue working for those who were already connected. > Once the system had stabilized, we began lifting these rate limits to enable more connections to Slack. However, we moved too quickly and the increased activity affected the system again. We reinstated the rate limits and redirected some traffic to the database replicas to relieve the demand on our primary databases. I wonder if their bottleneck is at vitess vttablet or at mysql.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- abe-101 5y agoDown for me. Using the browser.
- mirekrusin 5y agoBrowser fails with the same message: Something’s gone awry and we’re having trouble loading your workspace. Sorry we can’t be more specific – this is one of those cases where we don’t know what’s gone wrong either. A restart of Slack might help, and you can always contact us. ps. restart of slack in browser? wtf?
- jon-wood 5y agoSomewhat OT, but I love the phrasing "Something's gone awry", so much more elegant than the usual "Oops, we dun made a bad".
- gruez 5y ago>restart of slack in browser most people IME use the slack app, in which case "restart" makes sense.
- mirekrusin 5y agoYes, I know.
- CyanLite2 5y agoThe desktop app is Electron, or something similar.
- chefandy 5y agoYeah— it's Electron. They made a big deal about moving away from their native client code bases a few years ago.
- jerf 5y ago"ps. restart of slack in browser? wtf?" In all seriousness, since I'm sure a lot of people don't know this, use SHIFT-CTRL-r. That instructs the browser to reload everything, ignoring cached resources. This can occasionally "restart" a web page that even a reload or loading the URL in the URL bar again is not sufficient for. Slack is one of those things I've seen it work on. However, SHIFT-CTRL-r isn't enough now.
- jillesvangurp 5y agoIt's down for some channels for us. Getting a weird message undefined error when I try to post in one of our channels. Other channels are still fine. They are responding on twitter that there's something up: https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/1496133311558737923 https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/1496133311558737923
- danhab99 5y agoMy whole team doesn't want to work today because we'll have to use MS Teams as a backup. Rip
- onion2k 5y agoWe use Google Chat as a back up. It's always nice to see Google haven't killed it between Slack outages.
- VectorLock 5y agoJust set this up real fast as a quick backup, since we already use Gmail and everybody is already in it. Having a non-AWS hosted solution seems important to have a Slack backup for me, as well. Oh hey would you look at that, they support webhooks too...
- jeffbee 5y agoIsn't Google Spaces the Slack-like thing? Terribly confusing job Google has done.
- chefandy 5y agoThe MS Teams UX is pretty painful, especially for infrequent, communication-heavy users. Not painful enough to outright prevent work, but clearly more painful than the repercussions of missing a few hours of work.
- duderific 5y agoWe switched from Slack to Teams for various reasons about two years ago. I'm still mad about it. Teams blows for chat. The video meetings are fine though.
- skeeter2020 5y agoThis seems at best a funny tweet. They're both just tools and frankly terrible in terms of "getting work done". This seems like a great time to go heads down on a deep task and if you really need to contact someone send an email or even phone them.
- nate 5y agoOne fun thing we discovered an outage or two ago: Zoom, which is likely already on your computer too, has a very Slack-like Chat feature. Open up the Zoom app, then click the Chat icon in the top header. You probably missed it this entire time. You can make rooms, DMs, animated gifs, the works :)
- rythmshifter03 5y agoPlease don't encourage the use of Zoom, they already have enough market share they don't deserve after lying through their teeth to the public on multiple occasions.
- bitexploder 5y agoWhat alternatives do you recommend? As far as I can tell none of the major video conferencing solutions are made by companies I think are any more trustworthy than Zoom at this point. Plus Google and others ran a focused assassination campaign against Zoom at the start of the pandemic to claw some of their market share.
- djbusby 5y agoMattermost has replaced Slack here and I don't miss it at all. Jitsi Meet is pretty good for a/v
- cure 5y agoThere is Matrix (https://matrix.org https://matrix.org) which now integrates nicely with Jitsi (https://jitsi.org https://jitsi.org). There's also BigBlueButton (https://bigbluebutton.org https://bigbluebutton.org).
- bun_at_work 5y agoGoogle is certainly more secure than Zoom to outside attacks. Regardless of what Google chooses to do with your data, they do want to protect that data from everyone else, on your behalf. At least as much as any company can (government subpoena affects all companies).
- eshack94 5y agoI'm having issues with loading threads at the moment. So far that's all I've noticed.
- pempem 5y agoCompletely completely unavailable across two organizations
- mirekrusin 5y agoNow jira is not loading for me, wtf?
- swoe 5y agoSomewhat related, the peloton app is also down, how frustrating
- rmellow 5y agonope, JIRA still works for me unfortunately.
- mirekrusin 5y agoMine still doesn't - this whole thing is going to come down as AWS outage IMHO.
- blueyes 5y agoDown for me.
- seanw444 5y agoMost of my company have spotty connection. Down for Windows and Linux alike. Interestingly (and several have commented this already), the mobile app seems to be somewhat working.
- tombert 5y agoThings like this remind me how dependent I am on IM for doing any work, which is weird because it doesn't feel like that should be the case. If you were to measure the raw number of seconds I spend sending IMs, it would be a relatively low percentage of my day, but I always forget how vital that percentage actually is. As it stands, while I'm not fully blocked from being productive, I am blocked for a lot of work that needs to get done.
- shadowgovt 5y agoYep. Especially if your development flow has integrated Slack alerts. Coupled with COVID work-from-home constraints, there's no practical way right now to get code reviewed for merge into the main codebase 'round these parts.
- twistedpair 5y agoReminds me why we intentionally avoided tying core biz/dev workflows to Slack. :)
- alberth 5y agoDevils advocate... Do you tie core biz/dev workflows to Github (or any other service)?
- twistedpair 5y agoRequiring GitHub to deploy your code to prod... goodness no. Using, highly available, deterministic artifacts, that can be rapidly deployed or reverted from production is what we do.
- JPKab 5y ago"Some users": Every single person on my team and at my company.
- typon 5y agoGenuine question for those running self hosted tools like Jitsi: how often are your outages? How quickly do you repair them?
- dijit 5y agoI run an IRC network in my spare time that has had 13 minutes of actual downtime in the last 15 years (and about 20-25 additional minutes of degraded availability). The degraded availability thing is because I run multiple servers for latency, normally an IRC outage is super clear, except with netsplits where IRC servers themselves unlink from each other. (I average about 3 of those a year and they last about 30s roughly). It's not video though, so that doesn't answer your question thoroughly.
- anderspitman 5y agoThe cool thing about Slack (and Discord for that matter) is that it's essentially federated on a technical level. SlackHQ controls all the instances, but the UX is very achievable by an open source alternative. I'm bullish on federated chat in the next few years. It would be awesome to have essentially the same experience as using Slack, but also a server running on our lab's hardware that we can reboot/debug ourselves.
- whalesalad 5y agohttps://mattermost.com https://mattermost.com
- anderspitman 5y agoI'm pretty familiar with the various alternatives. Mattermost isn't federated, right? Anything without a strong inter-instance collaboration story can't replicate the experience of Slack/Discord.
- cguess 5y agoMattermost is not federated.
- bengale 5y agoThey've got to nail the integrations. Anytime moving to slack alternatives is brought up with people I work with, it always comes down to everything integrating with slack.
- anderspitman 5y agoThat's interesting. We've played with a couple integrations but don't use any. What sort of org are you in? We're an academic bioinformatics lab with 15-20 people.
- parkingrift 5y ago
- jordache 5y agowhat a sigh of relieve. It's a really refreshing feeling to know, that channel of communication is not available for anyone in my company. it's like a veil has been lifted off my eyes
- gavnewalkar 5y agoFun fact: For a lot of us, Slack web is down, but Slack mobile is still working.
- pgm8705 5y agoOddly, I'm the only person on my team of 15 that is having any issues.
- Ansil849 5y agoSlack is up for me...unfortunately.
- alex-korr 5y agoDown for my whole company.
- lbj 5y agoIf I was still a Slack user I'd be so happy right now :)
- topspin 5y agoWorking for me.
- SteveNuts 5y agoSlack client is down on my Windows 11 desktop, but up on my Windows 10 laptop. Mobile app also works fine. I'm putting my money on an expired certificate in certain client app versions.
- epivosism 5y agoSurprised no one is talking about how awesome slack is. Think about it in user stories: * I want to find someone by name => ctrl+K * I want to search with sane keywords => search, "from:me" "to:<channel name>" work. * I want to remember someone I talked to recently => people you chat with show up in the list on the left * I want to keep com channels organized as the ground changes => easily rename channels, favorites UI works well, channel grouping works right. * I want to give a public emotional response to someone's statement => reactions * I want to continue discussion of a point someone made, which may not be relevant to everyone in the channel => threads * I want to edit a typo I just made => hit up on keyboard It's got that quality Factorio has, where you can let yourself imagine it is the ideal product, and start expecting features you need to be there, rather than not bothering to explore because you think they won't be. It is AMAZINGLY good at solving actual user stories around communication. I have lots of respect for their PMs.
- iandanforth 5y agoctrl+k should be 'create link on highlighted text', I'm constantly frustrated by this.
- caleb_thompson 5y agoAh but ctrl-v while highlighting text with a URL on the clipboard creating a link is such a nice experience. I honestly wish I could do that everywhere.
- brandonmenc 5y agoctrl+k should be "kill line" and I'm constantly frustrated by the "create link" behavior in apps like Confluence.
- ectopod 5y agoWhat? ctrl+k should enter a digraph.
- jordache 5y ago
- OfflineSergio 5y agoIt's back :)
- jjice 5y agoWhenever I see a product this large having an outage (a lot recently, especially with Facebook, GCP, and AWS), I can only think of how stressful it must be for whoever needs to fix it. I've been on the other side of the outage before, albeit with a much smaller product, but lord was that stressful. Thinking about the random engineers that are stressed out and thinking that they could be fired for this, even if the cause wasn't their fault (since management at large companies can be pretty thick) is very upsetting to me. Say what you want about a large company having a large outage, but it's normal engineers that are trying to fix it at the end of the day, and I can sympathize.
- pqseags 5y agoI can also sympathize with the engineers trying to fix this, but I hope that they wouldn't be thinking that they could be fired for this. Successful teams that I have worked on, even at big companies with high-usage products, have always promoted a culture of "systems break - let's improve the system, not blame a person". Any 'mistake' by an employee is actually a sign of a problem with the system. Any resilient system should account for human errors - those always happen. I wouldn't want to work for a team or company that would consider firing somebody for causing an outage rather than addressing the root cause.
- lima 5y agoIn a well-managed engineering organization, it shouldn't be stressful. Sense of urgency, sure, but stress is typically only making things worse.
- kazen44 5y agostressing out and panicing is the worst thing you can do in this situation. usually, keep your head cool and focus on the problem at hand. This is also the reason why engineering/operations should be seperate from customer communications. The people who are fixing the issue should not also be the ones doing the communication with the outside world.
- rajbot 5y agoI work at Slack and have learned a lot from our Incident Response program. Brent Chapman helped put it together, and has a USENIX talk about it here: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon21/presentation/chapman https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon21/presentation/chap... Response for this incident went by the book, as described in Brent's talk above. Incident Management programs like these ensure that incidents can be resolved while also minimizing stress and chaos for engineers and other responders. PagerDuty has a good Incident Responder and Incident Commander training courses, if you are interested in setting up a program similar to Slack's: - https://response.pagerduty.com/training/courses/incident_response/ https://response.pagerduty.com/training/courses/incident_res... - https://response.pagerduty.com/training/incident_commander/ https://response.pagerduty.com/training/incident_commander/ Fun fact: Brent Chapman is also known for creating the `majordomo` mailing list manager from the early 90s
- haroman 5y agoAt first, I thought it was just my internet connection making fun of me. Then, I asked my co-workers if they experienced the same thing, and they did. It's a bummer that it temporarily made our communications quite hard and unstable.
- irthomasthomas 5y agoHow are there two active threads on this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30428142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30428142 It's pretty confusing.
- speeder 5y agoSlack was down to me, and now that it is back, it is begging me to subscribe to use paid features, with the nag screens blocking my view of important stuff. I guess it was down so they could do this crappy update.