On Wednesday, Slack, the widely-used workplace messaging platform, faced an outage, causing a disruption in communication for thousands of users. Slack is a cloud-based messaging platform owned by Salesforce, which acquired the company in late 2020 for $27.7 billion, marking the largest acquisition in Salesforce’s history.
Since its launch in 2013, Slack has become an essential tool for workplace communication, boasting more than 200,000 paid customers across 150 countries. The platform was created by Stewart Butterfield, who previously co-founded the photo-sharing app Flickr. After the failure of an online game called “Glitch,” Butterfield pivoted to building a messaging tool for businesses, which ultimately led to the creation of this messaging platform.
According to DownDetector, a website that tracks service disruptions based on user reports, over 3,000 people were experiencing problems with the service around 11 a.m. EST. While the number of reported issues decreased drastically by 3 p.m. EST, many users continued to face challenges throughout the day.
What Caused the Slack Outage?
The issue began around 10:27 a.m. EST when Slack’s tech dashboard first indicated problems with users being unable to connect to or load the platform. By 11:40 a.m., the peak of the outage had been reached, with approximately 3,100 users reporting issues on DownDetector. However, as the day progressed, the number of affected users started to decline, and by 3 p.m. EST, only 439 reports were logged.
At 12:26 p.m., Slack acknowledged the problem and released an update stating that the “investigation is still in progress” regarding deprecated functionality for several key features, including workflows, threads, message sending, and API-related services. Slack promised to provide updates as more information became available.
Despite some users reporting that Slack was starting to function again, the platform continued to struggle with outages for others. At 3:05 p.m. EST, Slack confirmed that it was still “working to restore functionality to affected Slack features.” The platform’s tech dashboard reported specific issues with logging in, messaging, apps, integrations, APIs, and workflows. However, as of 3:05 p.m., other features such as notifications, search, file sharing, huddles, workspace administration, and canvases were not reported to be impacted.
By 3:34 p.m., the company revealed it had identified the cause of the issue. However, the company warned that the problem had not been fully resolved, and some users might still experience disruptions.
During the outage, many users reported difficulties in accessing their workspaces. A typical error message read, “We’re having trouble loading your workspace,” indicating widespread connectivity problems. According to reports, about 60% of users struggled with connecting to the Slack app, while 24% faced server connection issues, and 16% had problems accessing the website.
Slack’s engineering team quickly began investigating the cause of the outage and issued a public apology on its status page. “Our engineers are investigating what’s happened. We apologize for the disruption, and we hope to be back to normal soon,” the message read. The outage had a serious impact on businesses that rely on this platform for daily communication and collaboration. Many users found themselves unable to access their workspaces or send messages, disrupting workflows and causing delays. Slack further advised users to check its status page at slack-status.com for the updates as the situation developed.