Messaging and Communication

Ending 2020, after the holiday week, people in the United States went on to work again on Monday. But the Monday did not go very smoothly for the office messaging company Slack, as it faced an outage on the very day.

What is Slack and Why it is used

Slack is an office messaging and communication platform, developed by an American software company Slack Technologies. The app is used for sharing information, chatting, voice and video calls, transferring documents by thousands of users and companies. It has been providing its services since 2013 and has become the first choice of many companies for establishing a private network of communication for their office staff and clients. The company has also seen a hike in the number of users during the Pandemic.

The Full-Blown Outage

Slack went down at around 10 AM ET on Monday, and the users started reporting about the problem. There were issues with sending messages, loading the channel, making calls, transferring files, and many of the users even reported that they could not log in to their slack accounts. During the outage, the calendar on Slack as well as the notifications was also not working.

By 10:14 AM, the company also confirmed that the app was facing some issues, and later, it also acknowledged that an outage had occurred. “Customers may have trouble loading channels or connect to Slack at this time. Our team is investigating and we will follow up with more information as soon as we have it. We apologize for any disruption caused”, the company updated, “The problem remained for about more than two hours, and after that, the platform started working fine for some of the users at about 12:20 PM. But many of the users were still facing the interruption. The company also continued to update its official Twitter account with information regarding the problem. “

All hands are on deck on our end to further investigate,” one of its tweets said.”At 3:10 PM, the company tweeted, “We’re truly sorry for the disruption today. We’ll be back with a summary of this issue.”

Cause of the Problem

In the pandemic, the companies were heavily relying on the various messaging and video conferencing apps, including Slack, Zoom, Google, etc. This might also be a reason that those platforms were facing such issues. Last year, in the mid of December, Gmail from Google also faced a similar blackout for some time, where users were continuously getting some error messages. This outage encouraged users to shift from one platform to the other so that they could complete their work on time. But since these apps recovered in a few hours, users could use them again.

The Salesforce Deal

But those issues are not permanent, as these companies are continuously working towards improving their tools for the users. Recently, the American cloud-based software company Salesforce announced to buy Slack for an amount of $27.7 billion (roughly Rs. 2,03,400 crores) and adding more features and tools to the platform. The company also revealed that it will be merging the Slack messaging technology to its platform so that users can manage the marketing and sales teams from a single platform.

Back to Normal

After the big-blown outage, reportedly, Slack is working perfectly smooth now. “Seeing improvements with error rates on our site, and we believe affected customers should be able to access Slack,” said a spokesperson of Slack. Though thousands of people reported the issue with the platform, the company hasn’t given any figures or number of how many users faced the disruption.