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Incident at Slack
- midasuni 5y agoAnother day, another SAAS outage.
- rarba786 5y agoMy mind went completely diff direction after reading "Incident AT".
- hericium 5y agoMine as well. I understand that Slack is widely used and I appreciate seeing their post-mortems discussed on HN but I don't consider image uploads issues with no technical explanations news-worthy and valuable enough for HN.
- mritzmann 5y ago> but I don't consider image uploads issues with no technical explanations news-worthy and valuable enough for HN Have you read the status entry? Among other things, calls is also affected.
- kowlo 5y agoIt seems you are of the minority... it's on the front page
- hericium 5y agoA 404 link with a catchy title and "Show HN" raided from Twitter were also on the front page in recent hours.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mmaunder 5y agoYeah really bad choice of word. “Availability” or “Degraded” is what they’re looking for.
- yucky 5y agoSame, this read like workplace violence. "Outage At" would be more accurate.
- bayindirh 5y agoYesterday Discord & Spotify, today Slack. Is it normal to have these big guys fail back to back?
- WJW 5y agoYes, that is completely normal. SAAS service disruptions happen all the time.
- s_dev 5y agoSo why do they pride themselves on a 99.9% uptime if downtime is common and normal?
- hoffs 5y agoDowntime is not the same as service disruption
- macinjosh 5y agohuh?
- adolph 5y agoA service might be unavailable due to an intentional downtime for maintenance. This is often hidden by various redundancies but certain bottlenecks may remain.
- s_dev 5y agoYou've just intentionally disrupted the service then.
- bayindirh 5y agoYou can announce downtime for a certain capacity of a service ahead of time. Which is essentially planned maintenance with some capacity hit, but when it's unplanned it's called disruption. Also, generally disruptions come with a bigger capacity loss, even if you don't lose the service outright. These terms are not limited to cloud infrastructures and not new either. Computation clusters use these terms for at least 12-13 years (from my experience) or for even longer.
- jzer0cool 5y agoThis is more a service degradation / outage than an incident.
- aaronblohowiak 5y agoHow do you differentiate outage from incident?
- jzer0cool 5y agoThe title here might as well be called — "Something happened at Slack". Could you be more specific? — "An incident at Slack" Could you be more specific? — "An outage at Slack" Could you be more specific? — "..." Would rather see something more specific: "File Upload & Emoji Service Degradation at Slack" ( — insert emoji memes ). Arguably, title is a bit misleading whether it warrants front page news for this community.
- londons_explore 5y agoI wonder if there is a market for making a clone of slack, which syncs all data from slack, simply for use when slack is down. Big companies could pay monthly for "slack redundancy" from a third party.
- sdevonoes 5y agoWell, I wouldn't use such a clone. When Slack is down, I actually feel relieved. I know I can turn off Slack any time I want, but the reality is that companies expect one to be online all the time (except during breaks of course) in regular working hours. I try to keep Slack as an async communication tool, but stakeholders just don't care about that. Also, I have a bunch of channels I cannot mute, so there is always something going on on such channels (which brings anxiety and discomfort). So, when Slack is down, it's actually a nice "everybody is offline: either take some time off or work focused on whatever you need to work on"... which is a nice thing to experience from time to time during regular business hours.
- outsomnia 5y agoSounds like slack is the new "spend all day in your cubicle".
- rjh29 5y agoYou could break that expectation. I personally turn off notifications except for @-ing my name or @channel, and check DMs hourly. It has not been a problem, well, people don't DM me as much because I don't reply. Half the time they figure out the answer by themselves anyway. Ideally you could discuss that the notifications are making you anxious and less productive and your employee could accommodate that. If your employer is not interested in helping you become more productive then maybe look somewhere else? You don't have to settle. Your mental health is paramount.
- lopis 5y agoReading people's experiences in their companies makes me feel a) sad that there's so many people that have to endure this kind of work environment, b) so fortunate that I can't identify myself with any of this. If I text someone and they reply within a day, that's fine to me, and it's fine to any of my colleagues. If it takes more than a day, I'll ping them again, and everyone can still chill.
- jafoi 5y ago
- Zardoz84 5y agoAhhh... so this explain why suddenly I was having problems to share a ODT file.
- marapuru 5y agoI'm a bit baffled that a company with a communication tool like Slack does not communicate about these incidents _through_ slack itself. Why can't there be a little service notification somewhere in the screen? I know it wouldn't help much when the entire service is down, but when parts fail won't it be helpful to at least indicate this to the user? Or might that be due to potential negative brand marketing that springs into existence when users see such a notice inside their application?
- madeofpalk 5y agoWouldn't that be an anti-feature? When Slack is down, Slack can't tell you when it is down. It's why status pages are often on other domains/systems etc, so the status page remains up while everything else is on fire.
- dagw 5y agoWhile it of course won't work in every case, in this case Slack wasn't down, you just couldn't attach files in some situations. This is something Slack easily could have communicated as soon as you tried to attach a file. Now it look like it worked and then times out after a couple of minutes and deleted your message
- lenn0x 5y agoEver since this started, been seeing 100% failure on webhooks for Event subscriptions.
- can16358p 5y agoIf it's on a different domain and servers, I don't think it will be an issue. If they have it on an API call to (making it up) api.slack.com/status it might very well go down when things go wrong, making it useless. However if they physically host it elsewhere ideally on a different cloud provider, with a different domain, say, slackstatus.com/api-status that is completely separate from the actual services, which can both query the actual service with a call from outside and can be updated manually with physical persons at Slack, and the client checks that domain, I think it can work.
- 5350-uiop-1130 5y agoI find slack so bloated and slow it would probably take me about 15 minutes to realise it was actually down.
- makeavish 5y agoSlack should develop native apps now as they are no longer a lean startup and can afford to build native apps.
- brimble 5y agoSlack should at least bridge to an open protocol, if not use one outright, so I can use any client I want. Like they used to.
- smazga 5y agoThe gloss of Slack was lost to me when they took down the irc and xmpp bridges. I really liked the freedom to do it my way. Then it became just another crappy messaging app.
- jacobr1 5y agoIf all you want is messaging, use irc, matrix or an xmpp system. The real value of slack is all the integrations and ecosystem built on top of it. That is much harder to integrate with an arbitrary client. It could be done, they could publish "enriched messaging" standards or similar and breakout capabilities that clients could support, but just supporting vanilla messaging at this point would be a severe degradation of slack's capabilities.
- temp0826 5y agoRipcord [0] supports slack, but probably lacks a few features. It's very fast. [0] https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ https://cancel.fm/ripcord/
- 5y ago
- braymundo 5y agoTime for self-hosted https://rocket.chat https://rocket.chat :)
- spacephysics 5y agoI know a bunch of SaaS and other services have been hit, but at this is like the 3rd major slack outage this month. And typically my colleagues and I need to search third party sites to get any notification of what’s happening.
- einpoklum 5y agoSlack is not a good enough replacement for IRC. Centrally controlled, heavy and bloated - nope, nope, it's just not it.
- uoaei 5y agoIn my dreams I manage a locally-hosted Matrix homeserver in our company's VPN. (We're not big.) They just added voice calls via web UI. Not E2EE yet but if you're on an encrypted VPN then that's kinda moot anyway.
- einpoklum 5y agoI like the idea of Matrix, but - can you get simple, thin, GUI clients for it like you have for IRC? IIRC, most GUI clients for it feel like something running inside my web browser...
- uoaei 5y agoMany options here: https://matrix.org/clients/ https://matrix.org/clients/ Seems to be more on the "glossy" and "web client" end of the spectrum in general but probably there is some reasonable compromise to be reached from the proliferation of different clients.
- molotovbliss 5y agoElement is a pretty nice client for matrix. Only been using it for a week but it's not too shabby on Windows/Android. https://element.io/ https://element.io/
- ElevenLathe 5y agoI haven't had much occasion to use it (I dipped into a gaming group that used Matrix but quickly fell out of it) but https://github.com/poljar/weechat-matrix https://github.com/poljar/weechat-matrix seems mostly adequate if you are a weechat user and just need the text chat features. Feels just like IRC.
- gigatexal 5y agoffs -- hoping my company just moves their stuff to self hosted mattermost and calls it a day
- orthecreedence 5y agoIt will replace email.
- nicolas_t 5y agoAnother week, another slack outage. Somehow it feels like they've had very frequent outages the past few weeks.