Slack is down for thousands, and we’ve got no idea when it’ll be back

Here’s the latest update from Slack:

“We’re continuing our efforts to restore functionality to affected features such as workflows, sending messages, threads and API-related features. Users may also experience issues when attempting to log-in. We appreciate your continued patience. More updates will be shared as soon as possible.”

And some more for Desire:

A rather regular occurrence

Over the past four years, Slack has had at least one big outage every single year. We had one in January 2021, one in February 2022, March 2022 and July 2022 and the last one was in July 2023.

So the popular business communication platform is not immune to downtimes and the fact that it keeps happening is worrying to say the least.

Wonder how quickly I’ll get sick of seening the image below? Slack is still borked for me.

Thanks to the magic of cloud-based software, I’ve got some insights from Desire Athow, Managing Editor of TechRadar Pro, on the state of play with Slack and what the outage means for businesses.

“Here’s how we’re coping. Slack is a single point of failure for an entire organization, when it went down a few minutes ago, my first thought was, what do we have as an alternative?” he writes.

“Slack is where all real-time communication happens within tens of thousands of businesses including. At the time of writing, Downdetector has thousands instances of outage reported over the past three hours and rising.”

I can’t tell if I’m feeling rather zen from the lack of Slack notification dings, or if I’m feeling rather isolated; the latter is probably down to me also listening to an atmospheric sci-fi soundtrack as I type.

On its service status page, Slack has posted the following:

“We’re still working to restore functionality to affected Slack features such as sending messages, workflows, threads and other API-related features. Users may also experience issues when attempting to log-in. Thank you for your continued patience as we continue investigating. We’ll be following up with further updates as they become available.”

So we’re back to some rather old school communication in the form of email and collaborating in Google Docs. No bad thing, as Google’s G Suite is a rather robust set of tools. Equally, this isn’t exactly optimal.

Usually when outages happen they don’t always directly affect us at TechRadar. But we all use Slack to collaborate remotely and across multiple countries and continents.

So this is a outage I’m really feeling directly; I can’t quickly contact my colleagues in the US, which is a pain when there’s a major Amazon product event going on.

Just got an email from Future Publishing’s (the company that owns TechRadar) IT department that Slack is down across the board.

Ok now he’s just told me his Slack is down. So yeah, this isn’t good for remote collaboration.

But this outage doesn’t appear to be affectinve everyone, as my boss Marc Mclaren reports his Slack is still working… how odd.

Yeah so Slack is definitely down and I’m kinda flying blind with no easy contact with my colleagues.