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Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

status.slack.com

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Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#101
post #82
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netsplit

Anybody knows why the netsplit was written *.net *.split Why those stars and dots ?

I believe it's an effort to show a netsplit in the traditional form (server1, server2) without placing blame on a particular server.

Back when I IRCd regularly (and perhaps this is still the case today), certain servers would get a reputation for splitting more than others, and I think this network (and/or its ircd) decided to mask it without breaking the general format.

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#103
post #93
post #3

It's times like this I wish there was a solid decentralized standard to pick from, but there's no clear choice between XMPP and Matrix.

Matrix is my preference for sure. It's fresh and exciting. While XMPP is harder to talk people into trying

If you are interested we are building a communication platform for communities fully based on XMPP https://movim.eu/ :) It can easily be deployed on a Web server.

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#104
post #33

You know how much of the community uses one messaging system when 15 minutes after it going down, it has over 40 points on the front page! This says a lot about how it's a single point of failure in modern company comms. It's even worrying to think about how some users probably have production-dependent (dare I postulate it) workflows in Slack that get crippled by its outage... ITT: Chat about decentralisation that w…

Yes it's a single point of failure, but so what? I don't particularly care whether other organizations fail at the same time as I do, I just care whether I fail. Hosting my own chat system does not solve that problem. In fact, it may make it worse because then I have to worry about system administration, and Slack probably has more expertise on that. It's likely that they can fix this problem for all customers faster…

In a way there's a second single point of failure though, right? So many people use Slack to integrate all kinds of things, and rely on their interaction with those platforms through Slack, that if Slack goes down then productivity halts and it's totally out of your hands while Slack themselves try to resolve the issue.

- You don't get GitHub notifications on pull requests and comments, so things don't get reviewed and merged if developers aren't in the habit of checking the PR tab on GitHub itself.

- You don't get CI notifications so you won't know how your latest test run or deploy is going without going straight into the CI service itself. Even worse when there's a failure and you're too used to having Slack warn you about that.

- Your team might depend on Slack so much that they don't know how else to efficiently communicate, and the most efficient channel to communicate a fallback is not available or rarely checked (e.g. email, face to face). So you get a lot of chaos as people come up with dozens of alternatives.

This is just poor discipline more than anything, putting too many structural eggs into one basket, but it doesn't change the fact that Slack has created that dependency.

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#105
post #93
post #3

It's times like this I wish there was a solid decentralized standard to pick from, but there's no clear choice between XMPP and Matrix.

Matrix is my preference for sure. It's fresh and exciting. While XMPP is harder to talk people into trying

Their site (https://matrix.org) reeks of hype-oriented engineering. From the most cursory overview of their home page, their decentralization looks a lot like IRC peering.

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#106
post #33

You know how much of the community uses one messaging system when 15 minutes after it going down, it has over 40 points on the front page! This says a lot about how it's a single point of failure in modern company comms. It's even worrying to think about how some users probably have production-dependent (dare I postulate it) workflows in Slack that get crippled by its outage... ITT: Chat about decentralisation that w…

I'm not sure about production dependent, but I'd love to see how many other companies have longer/worse outages thanks to this. There are definitely a lot of people counting on Slack as a sole channel to push low-level error notifications, and I doubt most of them have an easy fallback option.

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#107
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it's a single point of failure, but so what? I don't particularly care whether other organizations fail at the same time as I do, I just care whether I fail. Hosting my own chat system does not solve that problem. In fact, it may make it worse because then I have to worry about system administration, and Slack probably has more expertise on that. It's likely that they can fix this problem for all customers faster…

In a way there's a second single point of failure though, right? So many people use Slack to integrate all kinds of things, and rely on their interaction with those platforms through Slack, that if Slack goes down then productivity halts and it's totally out of your hands while Slack themselves try to resolve the issue. - You don't get GitHub notifications on pull requests and comments, so things don't get reviewed a…

If your team can't check on that stuff manually for a few hours while Slack is down, then I think you may have bigger problems.

If anyone on my team came to me and cited Slack being down as a reason for their inability to do their job, then they wouldn't be on my team.

Is it less than ideal? Yes. Is it a little bit less efficient to pull info instead of having it pushed to you? Yes.

Is the sky falling? No.

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#108
post #33

You know how much of the community uses one messaging system when 15 minutes after it going down, it has over 40 points on the front page! This says a lot about how it's a single point of failure in modern company comms. It's even worrying to think about how some users probably have production-dependent (dare I postulate it) workflows in Slack that get crippled by its outage... ITT: Chat about decentralisation that w…

I worked at an open source company where they hosted their own IRC server. There are OSS alternatives to Slack and I wonder if that company has tried to adopt any of them.

This all goes back to one basic fact: The Cloud is Someone Else's Computer(tm).

If your hosted Confluence or Jira is down, you can go walk over to your IT team and they'll be like, "Yea we know. We broke something. We're working on it." If you're using a hosted (a.k.a "Cloud" solution), you're just kinda fucked. You can't even extract your data and try to run it locally if it's down (if that's even an option).

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