Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

status.slack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 278 posts

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#131

Post by Theodores »

fsiefken wrote: post #74

for a decentralized alternative: https://matrix.org/blog/home/

They have too many 'decentralized', i.e. blockchain, things on their landing page for my liking. However, since blockchain 'technologies' are the wonder kool-aid for everything and given that messaging 'apps' are trivial compared to rocket surgery, how come that there isn't a messaging app that is decentralised with these wonder technologies, were it only costs you a few cryptokitties to get your messages and where you earn a few dogecoin to forward on other peoples messages?

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#132

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

nojvek wrote: post #121
anonu wrote: post #52

Previous outages: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16108912 - 5 months ago (longer discussion) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15597461 - 7 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15597431 - 8 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13811815 - 1 year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10616743 - 3 years ago

In light of how Slack and other companies haven't been able to get a decent level of uptime, I have to say, the company known to make huge web applications that don't go down in shame every couple of months is probably Google. I can't remember the last time Gmail was down. It just works! If google is down, probably your internet is down. Their expertise and discipline in distributed applications is unrivaled. I'm gue…

Facebook springs to mind as well.

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#133

Post by anderiv »

nojvek wrote: post #121
anonu wrote: post #52

Previous outages: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16108912 - 5 months ago (longer discussion) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15597461 - 7 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15597431 - 8 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13811815 - 1 year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10616743 - 3 years ago

In light of how Slack and other companies haven't been able to get a decent level of uptime, I have to say, the company known to make huge web applications that don't go down in shame every couple of months is probably Google. I can't remember the last time Gmail was down. It just works! If google is down, probably your internet is down. Their expertise and discipline in distributed applications is unrivaled. I'm gue…

While their mail service does have a remarkable track record for uptime, that same record is not shared by many of their other services.

I admin a number of GSuite accounts, and we experience fairly frequent (~monthly) periods of strange behavior with Hangouts/Meet, and Google Drive.

Fortunately Google is very good about providing updates via email to administrators as they're working through an issue.

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#134

Post by sarreph »

FooBarWidget wrote: post #90
sarreph wrote: 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…

> And it's not like I'm crippled when Slack is down.

That's good for you (not being facetious), and good that you've built your workflow to not be reliant on it.

My original point was that who knows how many people are too reliant on Slack though, e.g. for production-dependent notification / bot chains... Maybe that says something about their workflow and how there are underlying problems anyway for them.

I too am happy to revert to analogue / other forms of communication. However, I don't want to start a 'look how sturdy our workflows are / how bad people are that rely on Slack too much' circle-jerk. I'm just arguing that it's clearly too much of a single point of failure for too many people at this point. It's essentially Too Big To Fail for too many people now.

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#135

Post by detaro »

Theodores wrote: post #131
fsiefken wrote: post #74

for a decentralized alternative: https://matrix.org/blog/home/

They have too many 'decentralized', i.e. blockchain, things on their landing page for my liking. However, since blockchain 'technologies' are the wonder kool-aid for everything and given that messaging 'apps' are trivial compared to rocket surgery, how come that there isn't a messaging app that is decentralised with these wonder technologies, were it only costs you a few cryptokitties to get your messages and where y…

Just to be clear, the Matrix protocol and technology does not involve Blockchains in any way.

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#136

Post by dawnerd »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #132
nojvek wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In light of how Slack and other companies haven't been able to get a decent level of uptime, I have to say, the company known to make huge web applications that don't go down in shame every couple of months is probably Google. I can't remember the last time Gmail was down. It just works! If google is down, probably your internet is down. Their expertise and discipline in distributed applications is unrivaled. I'm gue…

Facebook springs to mind as well.

And it makes headlines when they are down even partially. Same with iCloud (although their track record isn’t the greatest)

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#137

Post by seba_dos1 »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #132
nojvek wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In light of how Slack and other companies haven't been able to get a decent level of uptime, I have to say, the company known to make huge web applications that don't go down in shame every couple of months is probably Google. I can't remember the last time Gmail was down. It just works! If google is down, probably your internet is down. Their expertise and discipline in distributed applications is unrivaled. I'm gue…

Facebook springs to mind as well.

Facebook quite often breaks their stuff and/or goes down, however, their outages usually last for just a few minutes.

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#138

Post by Kiro »

sarreph wrote: 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…

Sure, it's worrying but worth it for me personally. I might go to jail due to this (seriously) but at least people won't die. For me that's the threshold.

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#139

Post by rattray »

nixgeek wrote: post #53

Despite having a vote increment velocity far exceeding other items, a publish time of only 25 minutes ago, and more points, this item just dropped from #5 to #7 on the front page. How’s that work exactly? Edit: It’s now droppped to #14 even with comment count also rapidly increasing.

Hmm, it's now off the front page entirely, which seems strange. I don't see much incendiary commenting or similar...

@dang, care to comment?

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#140

Post by philwelch »

FooBarWidget wrote: post #90
sarreph wrote: 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 fact, it may make it worse because then I have to worry about system administration, and Slack probably has more expertise on that.

Although with outages like these, I doubt it!

Post reply on HN