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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

#161

Post by subway »

mikec3010 wrote: post #154
FooBarWidget wrote: post #90

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…

I think it's inexcusable for a chat program to go down in 2018. * your hdd failed? Use a raid * your power went out? Use a UPS * your DNS went down? Use a fallback (slack2) * your whole datacenter flooded? Good thing you have multiple replicated cloud instances that seamlessly take over See, these are the issues that "the cloud" was supposed to solve. Not give us the same problems as before, just with a recurring bil…

The dark truth is I suspect we're moving in the opposite direction. Abstraction layers designed with that "chill, it's just a %s app" mindset are making their way into safety critical applications.

Eventually somebody is going to die because their pacemaker decided to throw cycles at mining monero.

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#162

Post by wlesieutre »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #137
SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They recently pushed out an iOS update for Messenger that crashed to springboard any time you tried to resume it from background. It took a couple of hours to get a new build up, plus however long for affected users to all install the new version.

I'd love to hear the story of how that made it through testing.

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#163

Post by dota_fanatic »

mikec3010 wrote: post #154
FooBarWidget wrote: post #90

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…

I think it's inexcusable for a chat program to go down in 2018. * your hdd failed? Use a raid * your power went out? Use a UPS * your DNS went down? Use a fallback (slack2) * your whole datacenter flooded? Good thing you have multiple replicated cloud instances that seamlessly take over See, these are the issues that "the cloud" was supposed to solve. Not give us the same problems as before, just with a recurring bil…

Slack is text, channels, images, video, sound, search, audio calls, video calls, screen share (and interface share), bots, myriad integrations, and more. Calling it just "send text from one computer to another" is wrong.

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#164

Post by codemac »

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…

And those SRE's?

They use IRC.

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#166

Post by ummonk »

sanderjd wrote: post #128
tapoxi wrote: 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.

It's not about the protocols, it's about having a client with a user experience that is acceptable to an entire company rather than just a team of engineers. Which decentralized protocol has such a client? (Speaking as someone who got burned trying to advocate for IRC at a company that eventually and inevitably switched to Slack.)

Curious why you got burned with IRC client UX given the multitude of clients available for it.

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#168

Post by dijit »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #155
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…

My company has a customer support system that relies on Slack chatops. It's an interesting morning, to say the least.

To me it raises a concern, chatops and slack integrations are /very/ common, it's a form of vendor lock-in on their side and it makes absolute sense.

However, if you become dependent on chat-ops to do your job. (say: fallbacks for common things have eroded due to lack of use) then suddenly your company is crippled. And why? for a chat service? The value add from slack is grotesquely small in isolation.

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#169

Post by dijit »

cbm-vic-20 wrote: post #105
dielan wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The federation elements actually work pretty well, more similar to XMPP than IRC.

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#170

Post by yeldarb »

amarraja wrote: post #76
neuromantik8086 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have little pity for the folks who decided that re-implementing a shell in a chat application was a well-conceived notion.

Hopefully they're learning this lesson. I can just see it now. A company's app is dying from all the timeouts to a slack webhook, however they can't deploy because slack is down.

It's just login that's not working it seems.

I keep getting automated push notifications from our bots (but I still can't connect to the app myself).

We use it for things like relaying user-flagged messages to our support team and reminding us when scheduled content has been automatically released.

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