Slack experienced a major outage on January 4th. The company initially described the service issue as an “incident” in a statement on its website , but later said it was an outage. Specifically, the company behind the popular messaging platform announced the following: “Customers may be experiencing issues loading channels or connecting to Slack at this time. Our team is investigating the incident and will provide more information as it becomes available. We apologize for any inconvenience.”
Downdetector, a website that tracks internet outages , saw a spike in reported issues with Slack at 10 a.m. yesterday, and the company released its statement about the issue at 10:14 a.m. Users were unable to send messages , load channels, make calls or log into the platform. Half an hour later, Slack said it was still investigating the outage. At 1 p.m., the company said some customers may have been able to connect, but the platform may have been experiencing degraded performance .
As reported by The New York Times, it is not yet clear exactly how many of Slack’s roughly 10 million daily users were affected by the outage. When asked about the extent of the outage and what may have caused it, a Slack spokesperson said there was no additional information beyond the statements the company posted on its website. In addition, the company spokesperson noted the following: “Our teams are aware of and investigating the issue. We know how important it is for people to stay connected, and we are working hard to help all customers use the platform as normal.”
Slack has become an essential tool for businesses, especially helping employees work and communicate remotely .More than 750,000 companies currently use the service, according to Slack, which became an independent public company in mid-2019.
Salesforce companythat sells software , announced in December that it would acquire Slack for $27.7 billion. Adobe said in November that it planned to acquire management software company Workfront for $1.5 billion, and Atlassian, which sells tools for developers, said it would acquire services business Mindville for an undisclosed price.
It's worth noting that Slack has faced a lot of competition, especially from Microsoft, which offers Teams. In July, Slack filed a complaint with the European Commission alleging that Microsoft had "unfairly" bundled Teams with Microsoft Office productivity products, including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
