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I'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 li

I'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 ago
Wouldn'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 ago
  While 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 ago
    Ever since this started, been seeing 100% failure on webhooks for Event subscriptions.
- can16358p 5y ago
  If 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.
  - zht 5y ago
    this sounds very complicated lol
    - sharklazer 5y ago
      No, not really. If your calls time out, ping the status server. Done. It sounds more like laziness than complication to me. But that typifies Slack dev culture—“just use duct tape”
      - Linkd 5y ago
        And that's exactly how you DDOS your status server.
        matthew-wegner 5y ago
        Why can't they put a status.json file on S3/CloudFront/R2/wherever? And in an absolute worst-case infra collapse, someone there could manually edit/upload a new one...
        charcircuit 5y ago
        Put a CDN in front of the status server. If that overwhelms your CDN then add some exponential back off to the mix.
    - can16358p 5y ago
      Initial setup is not much different than creating a new website, rest is trivial in practice. Easier than said.
- lopis 5y ago
  But in this case Slack was not down. Parts of the service were frustratingly lagging, like uploading a picture or using reactions. Circle CI does have this sort of warning on their sidebar. There's so many parts to a big software product that it would definitely useful to know if some part of it was having issues.
abcc8 5y ago
It makes perfect sense from a user perspective but I suspect the company isn't interested in making mere users aware of ongoing issues via the service itself.
abcmer 5y ago
Documenting on a webpage allows a historical record of the incident long after the incident is over. I agree that an in-app notification would also be a nice feature.
dr_pardee 5y ago
Add their status to one of your channels (https://slack.com/apps/A0F81R7U7-rss https://slack.com/apps/A0F81R7U7-rss) /feed subscribe https://status.slack.com/feed/rss https://status.slack.com/feed/rss
nonameiguess 5y ago
That feels like spam to me. Tell me image uploads aren't working exactly when I try to upload an image and no sooner. Or possibly keep some global in-app feature status page I can check on demand, but I don't want notifications about services and/or features I'm not currently using.

madeofpalk 5y ago

Wouldn'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 ago
While 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 ago
  Ever since this started, been seeing 100% failure on webhooks for Event subscriptions.
can16358p 5y ago
If 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.
- zht 5y ago
  this sounds very complicated lol
  - sharklazer 5y ago
    No, not really. If your calls time out, ping the status server. Done. It sounds more like laziness than complication to me. But that typifies Slack dev culture—“just use duct tape”
    - Linkd 5y ago
      And that's exactly how you DDOS your status server.
      - matthew-wegner 5y ago
        Why can't they put a status.json file on S3/CloudFront/R2/wherever? And in an absolute worst-case infra collapse, someone there could manually edit/upload a new one...
      - charcircuit 5y ago
        Put a CDN in front of the status server. If that overwhelms your CDN then add some exponential back off to the mix.
  - can16358p 5y ago
    Initial setup is not much different than creating a new website, rest is trivial in practice. Easier than said.
lopis 5y ago
But in this case Slack was not down. Parts of the service were frustratingly lagging, like uploading a picture or using reactions. Circle CI does have this sort of warning on their sidebar. There's so many parts to a big software product that it would definitely useful to know if some part of it was having issues.

abcc8 5y ago

It makes perfect sense from a user perspective but I suspect the company isn't interested in making mere users aware of ongoing issues via the service itself.

abcmer 5y ago

Documenting on a webpage allows a historical record of the incident long after the incident is over. I agree that an in-app notification would also be a nice feature.

dr_pardee 5y ago

Add their status to one of your channels (https://slack.com/apps/A0F81R7U7-rss https://slack.com/apps/A0F81R7U7-rss) /feed subscribe https://status.slack.com/feed/rss https://status.slack.com/feed/rss

nonameiguess 5y ago

That feels like spam to me. Tell me image uploads aren't working exactly when I try to upload an image and no sooner. Or possibly keep some global in-app feature status page I can check on demand, but I don't want notifications about services and/or features I'm not currently using.