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Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

status.slack.com

31–40 of 246 posts

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#31
There are reasons why email is async and supposed to be decentralized, with priority based fallback options. (The priority in mx records). Most email servers try to deliver to fallbacks, and even if that fails, will try to deliver for _days_.

For all people who think slack can replace email, think about these safeguards.

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#33
post #16

Meta - can we not post outages to HN? I understand that post mortem's are interesting learning lessons, but if you're curious whether S3 or whatever is down or not right at this moment, then use the subsequent status pages of those services.

If we could trust status pages, sure. But I've lost count of the number of times I've tried to use a service, failed, the status page says "all OK!" but Twitter and HN are full of outage reports.

Besides, the discussion here is useful. Someone has already pointed out that some messages are getting through despite returning 500s, so integrations are spamming duplicate messages everywhere. That's useful to me if I'm running an integration.

(besides x2, it's one thread with a very self explanatory title. Maybe just don't read it?)

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#34
post #16

Meta - can we not post outages to HN? I understand that post mortem's are interesting learning lessons, but if you're curious whether S3 or whatever is down or not right at this moment, then use the subsequent status pages of those services.

Personally, I enjoy the speculation and discussion during an outage like this. Also, occasionally someone from the mentioned company pops up in these threads

Agreed. It's fascinating to see speculation and it's almost a game when the real reason is found - we see who got it right!

It's also important - many here use Slack, and an outage may be confusing - most of us don't immediately look at status pages, so we have somewhere to go and discuss the happening.

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#35
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or not. I'm remote and I cannot ask questions nor coordinate action to solve live production problems due to this outage. Slack is becoming a SPOF for many organizations, especially distributed.

This is part of the problem - we all need to ask too many questions. We should be working on pre-defined tasks most of the time, where it doesn't matter if it's waterfall pre-defined or scrum time allocated.

The commenter above said they had to "solve live production problems", how exactly would "pre-defined tasks" help them?

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#36
post #16

Meta - can we not post outages to HN? I understand that post mortem's are interesting learning lessons, but if you're curious whether S3 or whatever is down or not right at this moment, then use the subsequent status pages of those services.

HN is a more reliable status page than most status pages.

Unless Hacker News is down, in which case you need to give up and go outside.

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#38
post #11

Is it just me, or do those outages seem far more common lately? Or maybe this is happening just as often as it used to, but now we're growing more dependent on cloud-based software so this is reported more prominently?

both - have a look at Slack's status history. They seem to have an outage of some sort every month

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#40
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to some prospective studies, some people would (and please stay with me on that) actually use slack to communicate about work-related matters with co-workers . More study are needed to clarify if this work-related communication might actually be required for work to get done. (Cal Newport is definitely preparing a book on that any time soon.) Unfortunately, the researchers are too busy maintaining their IRC…

I’ve hosted multiple IRC servers over the years and can’t remember ever having to do “maintaining” after the initial setup.

Honestly curious, how long did you last without having to:

* update the version of the IRC server

* update the version of the os of the machine running the IRC server

* repair a broken disk / fan / overflowed disk on the machine

* add / remove / reset password / change weird settings of users

I'm not saying this is "unbearable", and plenty of organisations have people whose job description would probably correspond to doing those tasks.

But I can definitely understand why you would want to skip them entirely and have someone host your chat - which is basically the job slack is paid for.

"Mission critical, but not paid by your customer" is always tricky to staff for, isn't it ?

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