Slack System Status

Entertaining to see them simultaneously claim 100% uptime in February and list outages both yesterday and today. If 'users can't send or receive messages' on a messaging platform, your service is down.

sumo89• 4 years ago

Can't fail those SLAs if you make up the numbers

bmitc• 4 years ago

What's also interesting is their carefully crafted language. They have "Slack is not loading for some users" listed everywhere instead of "most users" or "all users" and also "Something's not quite right" instead of "Something's not working" or "Something's wrong".

psanford• 4 years ago

If you look today (one day after the incident) you'll see that the status page now shows only 3 9s of uptime for the quarter.

sillyquiet2• 4 years ago

time to start up a SaaS service status SaaS to serve SaaS status

dijit2• 4 years ago

doesn't atlassian do that? and Pingdom?

https://documentation.solarwinds.com/en/success_center/pingd...

https://www.atlassian.com/software/statuspage

weird-eye-issue• 4 years ago

I've definitely already seen that before

edit: Yeah it was Atlassian's Statuspage. I am pretty sure I saw them before they were acquired though and never realized

falcolas• 4 years ago

For most large companies, their health page is updated manually by project managers or directors. The reason is simple: accurate reports make them look bad. And make them liable for refunds due to broken SLAs.

Amazon's famous for this; it's no surprise that Slack does it too.

TheHunter• 4 years ago

Something’s gone awry alright

_gmnw• 4 years ago

Wow, this might be more disruptive than the AWS outages. Remote companies should have some sort of backup plan for when this happens.

veryfancy• 4 years ago

Zoom?

:lolsob:

kennydude• 4 years ago

GitLab has this publicly documented as for what to do in such a situation https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/communication/#emergency-c...

rpastuszak• 4 years ago

Funny, my first impulse was to share this with my coworkers on the #engineering channel on Slack.

borner791• 4 years ago

Its time for Teams to shine

forgotpwd16• 4 years ago

The duration of constant freezes Teams has on every run outlast the total outage time Slack has per month.

skoskie• 4 years ago

Like … email?

wil421• 4 years ago

Or your phone. Or your companies conferencing software of choice.

collegeburner2• 4 years ago

Discord? Also supports VC so better than Slack.

aden1ne• 4 years ago

I am seeing a lot of errors with the following message: 'Message undefined (message missing text)'

ben1748• 4 years ago

...and cue the thread about how IRC is a better medium and SAAS has ruined communication.

SQueeeeeL• 4 years ago

I feel like that's a pretty reactionary painting of the issue, but wanting large platforms to provide access through open protocols that have been in use for decades and have many accessibility and usability benefits really seems pretty much a no brainer for anyone reading Hackernews.

iso16312• 4 years ago

should be

But how to you get that $1b valuation by making yet another client based on open standards? You have to corner the market, and 90% of HN readership want to create or work for a new unicorn, not just improve technology for the sake of it.

Spivak• 4 years ago

I just don't see why everyone doesn't just run their own always-online IRC bouncer and tweak their irssi config for hours to their liking to get an experience that's worse than Teams.

arminiusreturns• 4 years ago

So while I often use irssi, I have become recently fixated on how to compartmentalize all my different chats and I keep coming back to weechat on a vps that bridges slack, discord etc, so weechat bridges are another alternative. If you have a good idempotent spinup method with your vps it can also mean less data hanging around to be grabbed because you can just make a fresh one anytime, in any datacenter.

Trasmatta• 4 years ago

I definitely prefer Slack over IRC for internal communication.

But I've also kind of come to hate live chat for internal communication entirely...but email isn't a great alternative either. I'm beginning to think there are just irreducible complexities to human communication that make every platform non-ideal, and the best thing to do is to just set and manage expectations properly as a team and as individuals.

stavros• 4 years ago

Zulip is a great alternative (hi Austin!).

gjvc3• 4 years ago

SAAS / outsourcing has ruined organisation self-responsibility, but the MBA said it was a good idea, and the ill-informed CEO just followed.

LudwigNagasena• 4 years ago

IRC has existed for over 30 years and was widely popular for the big part of that timespan. Yet no one ever made it into or extended it into a realistic competitor to the modern wall garden proprietary chat platforms.

Is there a fundamental issue with IRC that precludes that? Did no one just bother? Is it the specific mentality among its core users that "absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature" that lead to its demise?

oblio2• 4 years ago

Money.

You can't make as much money with open protocols.

Worst of all, it's very hard to pitch such a business to people who would fund you, so your business is outcompeted very early on.

What users want and what entrepreneurs and investors want are two, largely uncorrelated, things.

ferdowsi2• 4 years ago

IRC was never widely popular outside of a gamer/geek niche. At its peak, QuakeNet never broke 250,000 "users", many of which were bots.

trasz• 4 years ago

There's no business model in IRC, and thus no marketing money.

jmclnx• 4 years ago

looks like the guy who took over freenode is doing his best to create a walled garden. Also plenty of people still on IRC, including me :)

FWIW, I like irssi much better than the slack front end, but as font ends go, slack's is not terrible.

rileyphone• 4 years ago

There's Pest [0], but I don't think it tries to be more usable, maybe even less so. I think it's hard to take old standards and put modern features on them; at some point it's more beneficial to just invent your own thing.

[0] http://www.loper-os.org/?p=4003#11-what-is-pest

pwm• 4 years ago

Just to preserve the full message :)

"Something’s gone awry and we’re having trouble loading your workspace. Sorry we can’t be more specific - this is one of those cases where we don’t know what’s gone wrong either. A restart of Slack might help, and you can always contact us."

cphoover2• 4 years ago

SAAS companies cannot be responsible for their own incident/status pages. This has been proven time and again.

vmception• 4 years ago

Sounds like a SaaS opportunity.

bussierem• 4 years ago

I assume a joke here haha -- no way are any of these companies pay another to hold them ACTUALLY responsible for their outage %. They would MUCH rather just lie.

ceejayoz2• 4 years ago

Who'd pay?

https://stop.lying.cloud/ exists for AWS.

collegeburner2• 4 years ago

You joke but https://www.atlassian.com/software/statuspage

rednerrus• 4 years ago

Couldn't Catchpoint or 1000eyes do it with their existing infrastructure?

mdellavo• 4 years ago

hmm didnt this happen once before after a long weekend?

StanAngeloff• 4 years ago

2022 Checklist for Confirming a Service is Down:

[ ] Do a Twitter search [ ] Scan through HN [ ] Check with peers [ ] Consult downdetector.com

…in this order. Do not bother with official status pages.

ben1748• 4 years ago

In this case - having happened to have noticed this at the exact time it occurred, I observed:

downdetector had it first

twitter had it second

peers were unfortunately unreachable (slack)

HN lagged by a significant margin

0xCMP• 4 years ago

that has also been my recent experience. works best for large services like discord and twitter which are recent examples for me.

Sebb767• 4 years ago

Do not bother with official status pages.

You should. If the status page is also down, you know it's going to take a while ;-)

nkozyra• 4 years ago

You should. If the status page is also down, you know it's going to take a while ;-)

Maybe. I've been shocked by some big companies co-hosting their status pages.

TT-392• 4 years ago

HN pointed me to the official status page though

tennis_sort• 4 years ago

Free at last! Woohoo.

rbone80• 4 years ago

Maddening. “Can’t send message. Tap to try again” - when Slack’s own status page shows green.

paulhart• 4 years ago

(For me at least...) The client.boot file is returning a 429 (too many requests).

gjvc3• 4 years ago

another data point to encourage groups of a certain size to host their own instance of something like https://zulip.com/ / https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/stable/production/install.ht...

smt88• 4 years ago

This option is dead for most of us because of Slack Connect (which allows cross-tenant communication, such as from x.slack.com to y.slack.com).

I now have 5-10 other organizations connected to any one of my Slack tenants, and now we're just stuck in Slack's ecosystem.

gjvc3• 4 years ago

cross-tenant communication as a method of a vendor locking in their customers, hah!

adaisadais• 4 years ago

Slack being down is so detrimental… it’s crazy.

I’ve almost forgotten how to send my coworkers email. It blows my mind how much we are so reliant on a few tools to carry out so much work.

Finster• 4 years ago

Looks like github is down, and aws is having issues, too.

https://downdetector.com/

I should've stayed in bed

uhtred• 4 years ago

Russian cyber attacks starting?

xhevahir• 4 years ago

I came here expecting to read lots of discussion about why this might or might not be the case. Oh, well.

novateg2• 4 years ago

You can use http://chat.google.com/ as a backup chat. I started using it with my team. It does not come with desktop app, but usable

silvr• 4 years ago

There's a "progressive web app" - if you're in Chrome on chat.google.com, there's a new icon on the right hand side of the URL bar which permits you to download it. Not discoverable at all - this was mentioned in the help pages [https://support.google.com/chat/answer/9455386]

xmdx• 4 years ago

Just as I was searching my slack workspace and found info to help fix a problem, what are the chances

novateg2• 4 years ago

Slack status page started showing some outages. Is it a manual process, I guess?

mccolin• 4 years ago

It's likely that a member of their SRE or DevOps team has to confirm the outage and "deploy" updates to that status page, yes.

whichdan• 4 years ago

Finally, a chance for Zoom Chat to shine! /s

hogrider• 4 years ago

And google chat is working very slow and weird... They can't figure out IM still in 2022.

CubsFan1060• 4 years ago

Github is also unreachable for quite a few people. But works through a VPN to another geography. Wonder if there is any connection.

njacobs5074• 4 years ago

What’s odd is that we have back-end services that send messages to Slack and those seem to be working absolutely fine.

Guess the failure is in a different part of their platform…

mirekrusin2• 4 years ago

Why this message lost first HN page?

dhbanes• 4 years ago

Why did this fall from #1 on HN to not on the front page in minutes? Is Slack a YC company?

mdb31• 4 years ago

[deleted, it's quite obvious HN is not interested in actual discussion]

ben1748• 4 years ago

wretchedly low-quality conversation

Some of the best conversations I've seen on HN spawn from these threads. They make us aware that we cannot depend on these service for mission critical things. They help us explore alternative options and allow us to share how we discovered the issue and what we did to weather the storm.

yes, status pages are slow to change. There's good reason for that

What on earth could be the reason for that? They are the best source to tell us that people are having issues. Why not report it the second it's detected?

how did people, especially those on "Hacker News" get so depressingly helpless?

Helpless? No - we depend on this news source to report relevant information the second it becomes relevant.

giovannibonetti• 4 years ago

It's probably just a coincidence, but about 1 hour ago I was using Slack normally and I was sending some regular expression tips [1] for some teammates. I was explaining how \d and \D works, and how they must be escaped when inside a Ruby double quoted string, like "\\d" and "\\D".

First I tried to send the message and the Slack app showed a tiny error message in that specific message I've just sent. Then I've pressed the retry button. Immediately the Slack app stopped working... And here I am, browsing on HN.

It immediately reminded me of this joke [2]

[1] https://www.regular-expressions.info/shorthand.html [2] https://twitter.com/brenankeller/status/1068615953989087232

iso16312• 4 years ago

6 minutes ago a collegue asked "issues with slack"

4 minutes ago I posted a screenshot of this being top story on HN so "yes" is a good bet

Now it's nowhere on the front page?

olingern• 4 years ago

From https://status.slack.com/

Uptime for the current quarter: 100%

This is another one of those system status pages that appears to be 100% for SLA reasons. An outage and partial outage are the same in my mind. I understand that money is involved, but the current trend into no visibility into company outages is frustrating to say the least.

bluetidepro• 4 years ago

Uptime for the current quarter: 100%

Hahaha Slack and I have very different definitions of uptime, as I'm currently unable to load the app. Company status pages are a joke these days. Workplace politics (stakeholders making an impossible SLA) have ruined yet another great idea.

maxbond2• 4 years ago

Myself & others at the office can only use Slack on mobile. The Electron app and website both fail to load. Messages feel sluggish and delayed.

pegyong• 4 years ago

It's been hours already, and it's pretty harsh and punishing for its users to wait for its uptime. I hope that they can take good care of this issue as soon as possible.

irthomasthomas• 4 years ago

How come there are two active threads on this? It's pretty confusing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30428788

Slack System Status

Related Stories