For many people, Slack is an important tool in the workplace. When the network went down on June 27, people from around the world responded on social media.
What Is Slack?
In 2013, Slack formally launched. This is a cloud-based software that allows teams to communicate with each other and share important documents. Slack stands for "Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge."
There are 8 million users across over 500,000 organizations on Slack. Currently, 65 companies on the Fortune 100 use Slack to improve workplace communication. The software is integrated with Google Drive, Trello, Dropbox, and other services.
It is rare for Slack users to experience outages. The most recent outage occurred on May 23. During June, users were experiencing a perfect 100 percent uptime until June 27.
Slack Went Down Around The World
Shortly after 9:00 a.m. on June 27, Slack users experienced connection issues and could no longer access the software. This was especially problematic because this is the start of the workday for many users. People all around the world were experiencing massive outages on Slack.
"We've received word that all workspaces are having troubles connecting to Slack," Slack wrote on its website. "We're currently investigating the issue, and will have updates shortly."
Every 30 minutes, Slack would provide updates about the connectivity issues. It continued to dispatch team members to try to fix the problem. The company wanted to fix the connection problems immediately. Even when Slack had no real update to provide, they still reassured users every few minutes on social media that it would get fixed. It took Slack over three hours to isolate the problem with the software.
Finally, before 1:00 p.m. on June 27, Slack announced that the issue was resolved and that connectivity was restored.
"We're happy to report that workspaces should be able to connect again, as we've isolated the problem," Slack wrote. "Some folks may need to refresh (Ctrl + R or Cmd + R)."
How People Responded
While Slack was down on June 27, many users went to Twitter to post their frustrations. Within a few minutes, Slack was trending on Twitter.
#Slack's been down for a while and it occurred to me. It's probably taking a long time for a whole bunch of people to work together on a fix, because Slack is down. — Aarøπ Dayalaπ (@DarthGooN) June 27, 2018
With Slack being down, productivity in thousands of companies is currently skyrocketing. — ᴠᴀɴ sᴄʜɴᴇɪᴅᴇʀ (@vanschneider) June 27, 2018
While Slack is down, don't spend the time realizing they now have a database of all your business strategies, corporate secrets, infighting, petty rivalries, affairs, legal cases, and could blackmail the entire world economy with the press of a button.
Enjoy your donut! — Patrick S. Tomlinson (@stealthygeek) June 27, 2018
