Slack, the popular messaging platform used by millions of people worldwide, reported being unable to access their Slack accounts for several hours Monday when workers headed back to the virtual office after the holidays.
According to the website Downdetector, which monitors service outages, more than 15,000 people complained of connection issues in places from Texas to Ukraine. “Down in my ‘home office,’” wrote one user on the site.
About 2:30 p.m. New York time, the company said its service was coming back online.
“We’re seeing improvements with error rates on our side, and we believe affected customers should be able to access Slack,” the San Francisco-based company said in a statement on its website, adding that some calendar apps and email notifications were still experiencing trouble.
At 3:10 p.m. Company said: “We’re truly sorry for the disruption today. We’ll be back with a summary of this issue.”
Salesforce.com Inc. agreed to purchase Slack Technologies Inc. late last year for $27.7 billion.
Now the Slack’s service is restored after experiencing a major disruption (at the time of writing).
The company later said it had resolved issues with its calendar apps and email notifications.
The website Downdetector, which tracks internet disruptions, recorded a spike in reported problems with Slack at about 10 a.m. Eastern time, and the company posted its first statement about the problem at 10:14 a.m.
Later in the afternoon, the spike appeared to have subsided.
During the outage, users could not send messages, load channels, make calls or even log in to the service, and some had problems with their calendars and notifications. The outage sent many people either to Slack’s competitors, like Google or Zoom’s video services, or back to phone calls and emails — tools that could feel antiquated to some employees who, while working from home for much of the last year, have grown used to the convenience and immediacy of the Slack app on their laptop or smartphone.
Service began to resume for some users around 12:20 p.m. Eastern.
“Some customers may be able to connect, but may also experience degraded performance,” Slack said at 1 p.m.
