Slack issues

https://status.slack.com/

by floriangosse • 3 years ago

102 65 3 years ago

status.slack.com

a012• 3 years ago

The website and app are not accessible (HTTP 503) but their status page is still green :smile:

floriangosse6• 3 years ago

Yeah, saw the same. Let's see how long it will take and when they update the status page.

antupis• 3 years ago

Well status pages are nowadays much worse indicator than HN or other sources because companies just don't update those.

4dregress• 3 years ago

Yep, its down for me as well.

yla92• 3 years ago

https://status.slack.com/ is not updated yet.

miyuru• 3 years ago

Its been 2 hours and the page still does not show any downtime. Whats the point of having a status page?

spuz• 3 years ago

The post should probably link to the status page (which shows all systems ok at the moment): https://status.slack.com/

MollyRealized• 3 years ago

... or not.

floriangosse6• 3 years ago

It seems to be back.

01acheru• 3 years ago

Another status page that sucks. Slack goes down, people start texting me about it, status page is green, HN informs me that Slack is actually down.

Next time I build a status page it will simply be a static HTML with green indicators and some random metrics, looks like it is the industry standard. :facepalm:

viraptor2• 3 years ago

There are two kinds of status pages. Those that show you red when the service is up (automated) and those that show you green when the service is down (manual and automated) - or some mix of those two. You don't want made up information too, so for the manual one you'll get some delay for the analysis of the situation.

Your actions are extremely unlikely to change if the downtime is for less than half an hour. So what exactly do you expect to happen here?

(Yes, I got annoyed at a thousandth comment that essentially says the status update is not instantaneous and perfectly reflecting the situation)

ilyt2• 3 years ago

I expect:

* not lying

* not having to dig out our logs and proofs for SLA reasons on obvious fuckup.

(Yes, I got annoyed at a thousandth comment that essentially says the status update is not instantaneous and perfectly reflecting the situation)

It's not about it being minute behind reality, it's about it lying in entirety. Why you have so much problems with understanding that ?

switch007• 3 years ago

If you accept that status pages are (partially) under the control of PR teams, it makes more sense that they’re useless and a lie.

croes• 3 years ago

More like this

https://www.hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.co...

efficax• 3 years ago

status pages are rarely automated and it looks like slack was down at like 1am pacific. somebody got woken up by a page and groggily escalated and they sat there fighting the outage for 30 minutes before someone said “what about the status page”. or at least that’s how it worked at my last company

stevewodil• 3 years ago

This is very accurate. Or the customer communication lead was shadowing and this was their first incident.

It’s all the same

nurettin• 3 years ago

Status page pull request is pending merge, because seniors are either fired or or overworked.

sjsdaiuasgdia• 3 years ago

Progression of status pages, from experience at a large cloud provider...

Stage 1: Status is manually set. There may be various metrics around what requires an update, and there may be one or more layers of approval needed.

Problems: Delayed or missed updates. Customers complain that you're not being honest about outages.

Stage 2: Status is automatically set based on the outcome of some monitoring check or functional test.

Problems: Any issue with the system that performs the "up or not?" source of truth test can result in a status change regardless of whether an actual problem exists. "Override automatic status updates" becomes one of the first steps performed during incident response, turning this into "status is manually set, but with extra steps". Customers complain that you're not being honest about outages and latency still sucks.

Stage 3: Status is automatically set based on a consensus of results from tests run from multiple points scattered across the public internet.

Problems: You now have a network of remote nodes to maintain yourself or pay someone else to maintain. The more reliable you want this monitoring to be, the more you need to spend. The cost justification discussions in an enterprise get harder as that cost rises. Meanwhile, many customers continue to say you're not being honest because they can't tell the difference between a local issue and an actual outage. Some customers might notice better alignment between the status page and their experience, but they're content, so they have little motivation to reach out and thank you for the honesty.

Eventually, the monitoring service gets axed because we can just manually update the status page after all.

Stage 4: Status is manually set. There may be various metrics around what requires an update, and there may be one or more layers of approval needed.

Not saying this is a great outcome, but it is an outcome that is understandable given the parameters of the situation.

m348e912• 3 years ago

https://downdetector.com/status/slack/

Slack is definitely down even though their status page says otherwise.

Incentives matter. If there is no penalty for misrepresenting the current state of an outage, you are going to find that company driven status pages are going to be frequently inaccurate.

rozenmd• 3 years ago

We noticed about 2 minutes of hard downtime (API and website) on OnlineOrNot: https://slack.onlineornot.com/

zamnos2• 3 years ago

In fact, there's an inverse incentive at play here. Slack is on the hook for missed SLA, so any admission of issue is legally and financially culpable. This means they don't want to admit to an issue until it's impossible to deny there is one.

Hamuko2• 3 years ago

There is also an incentive to display the proper status, since if you show all green when the service is down, you look dumb.

We recently improved our status reporting because our old status system might not accurately indicate if only a part of our service went down, so it might show green even though (some) customers definitely saw very obvious downtime.

wdr1• 3 years ago

And yet, this generally doesn't happen.

Slack now has the outage listed:

https://status.slack.com/calendar

The online cynicism is something I've never understood. It assumes the world is filled first first-order simpletons & somehow only the poster rises above it.

People aren't dumb & companies aren't dumb. People will notice a status tracker isn't accurate. They will have reduced confidence in the company. Companies know people will notice & think this way, so they generally don't engage in this type of deception. I'm sure there are exceptions, but in general, status pages have tended to be accurate in my experience.

Chris2048• 3 years ago

Their status page is not a report of status, but rather a report of admission.

swah• 3 years ago

Working normally for us.

codetrotter• 3 years ago

Works fine for me I think

petepete• 3 years ago

There was definitely a 20 minute window where it was down for us. Messages were occasionally getting through but often in the wrong order, and many just failed.

floriangosse6• 3 years ago

Yeah, same for me. Most of the messages I tried to send failed and I had to retry sending them at a later point.

yosito• 3 years ago

Finally! A chance to get some work done, undisturbed!

rohith2506• 3 years ago

And yet here we are commenting on HN ;)

LtWorf2• 3 years ago

plugging my IRC gateway https://github.com/ltworf/localslackirc

I find that using slack from IRC, and having the option to deprive some people/channels to notify me is very helpful to reduce the amount of distractions.

aestetix• 3 years ago

Nice! How does this compare to wee-slack?

onion2k• 3 years ago

Based on the notifications I've been getting all morning, I can say for sure it isn't.

mastazi• 3 years ago

Not down for me. OP's link takes me to Slack's homepage.

floriangosse6• 3 years ago

I was down at the moment I've posted it. As I wrote in another comment – it's back available for me as well.

j4nek• 3 years ago

productivity for adhd people now increase :)

blitzar• 3 years ago

Working fine for me. I think you might be holding it wrong.

floriangosse6• 3 years ago

I was down at the moment I've posted it. As I wrote in another comment – it's back available for me as well.

re-thc• 3 years ago

Slack is just slacking off.

floriangosse6• 3 years ago

For those who only rely on Slack's status page here are some other indicators (excl. HN):

* Twitter: https://twitter.com/search?q=%40SlackStatus

* Downdetector: https://downdetector.com/status/slack/

darkerside• 3 years ago

Would a decent status page be an actually intelligent use of blockchain? We could have a global network of computers responsible for determining a consensus on whether a service is truly and actually down or not. It could be captured in an independent ledger, and ideally used as a canonical determination for status pages, SLA disputes, etc.

luplex• 3 years ago

I think a normal company would be better suited

Traubenfuchs2• 3 years ago

You do not need a blockchain for this.

CPLX• 3 years ago

The year is 2071.

They built a house of straw. The thundering machines sputtered and stopped. Their leaders talked and talked and talked. But nothing could stem the avalanche. Their world crumbled.

The cities exploded. A whirlwind of looting, a firestorm of fear. Men began to feed on men.

On the roads it was a white line nightmare. Only those mobile enough to scavenge, brutal enough to pillage would survive. The gangs took over the highways, ready to wage war for a tank of juice. And in this maelstrom of decay, ordinary men were battered and smashed.

Except for one man armed with an AK-47, and a Honda full of silver. As he stood on the bluff, looking down at the desert spread for miles before him, a man approached, darkly.

“Instead of silver bars, have you considered blockchain for this?”

stevefan1999• 3 years ago

what if the blockchain itself was in an inconsistent state due to 51% attack (also known as split brain consensus)

ryanbrunner3• 3 years ago

This is compounded by the fact that there's no objective truth about whether something is down (as evidenced by this thread, outages are often not global or not across the entire service)

ryanbrunner3• 3 years ago

downdetector already does basically this effectively enough and is dramatically simpler in terms of technology. You don't really need to be overly complex about consensus for things like this - if a sufficiently large population reports something down, it's down, because the stakes aren't high enough for enough bad actors to be an issue.

ilrwbwrkhv• 3 years ago

slack is bitchware. a new term i use these days for software which is forced on employees because they have no other option (hence bitches). other examples of bitchware are microsoft teams, jira etc.

roofio• 3 years ago

Could it be that they actually serve a valuable purpose? If they didn't exist would you bitch about email being bitchware?

Rafi993• 3 years ago

Weird I didn't experience any issues today

terom• 3 years ago

Digging into the status page history reveals a reference to an issue lasting for 7 minutes, caused by a "minor technical change" that was rolled back. [1]

Still claims 100% uptime for May.

https://status.slack.com/2023-05-17

Traubenfuchs2• 3 years ago

You are wrong, their status page clearly says

Uptime for the current quarter:
100%

Slack issues

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