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Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

status.slack.com

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Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#221

Post by valerij »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #201
valerij wrote: post #62

reminds me of that one time a genius at IBM created an `ibm-global-announcements` channel and force-invited 200'000 people in it, and then some guy `@channel`d and all ibm's slack workspaces were down for 30 minutes https://status.slack.com/ibm/2018-03/f01d4c22cd953dd7 https://i.imgur.com/Rk6Kdgp.png EDIT: also that channel made using slack impossible for mac book air users, they had around 80% cpu usage for slack. s…

OT, but: > 200'000 Interesting. Why an apostrophe?

i've picked up this kind of thousand separation at some point to make large numbers scannable. c.f.

    1600000000
    1'600'000'000
separating at 10³ is due to counting customs of the region i live in.

using an apostrophe `U+0027` appears to be the least wrong use of possible glyphs accessible on my keyboard layout

also c++14 does it this way

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#222

Post by u801e »

Thaxll wrote: post #145
lqet wrote: post #74

Can someone explain to me why any company should outsource something as critical as internal communication to a company that is 5 years old? The video messaging left aside, is it really that better than time-tested solutions like email or just running an IRC server?

IRC is pretty much useless since you don't have history. Comparing Slack and IRC are like comparing TCP and HTML5. Why IRC is pretty bad in enterprise: - no audio / video - no history - no SSO / AD integration - no rich features like links, pictures, upload docs ect ... - easy bot integration with APIs, I can have Datadog pushing things to Slack ( alerts, graph... ) - no archiving channels on the go, Slack is very us…

> no audio / video

There are products that are far better for audio and video communication than Slack. At my company, we use Zoom.

> no history

Can be done with a bouncer if you need it.

> no rich features like links, pictures, upload docs ect

Is there a reason why an external service can't be used? I can't upload a image here on Hacker News, but I can always include a link to it.

> easy bot integration with APIs

So I have to use the HTTP protocol to manage a bot rather than checking for certain key words in the message itself.

> no archiving channels on the go, Slack is very useful when you have an incident and you create a temp channel and then archive it when the incident is closed.

That depends on the settings. One thing that happens every so often at work is that people get trapped as the last remaining person in a channel because only an administrator can archive a channel. In IRC, that's not an issue.

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#223

Post by johannes1234321 »

lqet wrote: post #74

Can someone explain to me why any company should outsource something as critical as internal communication to a company that is 5 years old? The video messaging left aside, is it really that better than time-tested solutions like email or just running an IRC server?

Aside from features:

I have seen enough corporate mail servers going down, irc and jabber servers breaking etc.

Using those won't magically give you 24/7 with more than five nines uptime.

Key difference is: If slack goes down many companies are affected and it goes on the internet. If a company's mail setup goes down employees are a bit annoyed, but after a while it works again and nobody outside notices and it's no news on HN (unless it's a real major thing bringing a notable company completely down)

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#224

Post by foxylion »

pmlnr wrote: post #215
untog wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With that many employees you're signing up for Slack's enterprise tier, and you can bet they price it so that they come out the right side of this cost/benefit calculation for a lot of companies.

I have seen those numbers. You could easily afford paying sysadmins with those numbers.

But managing an IRC server cluster for 10.000+ users is no simple task.

Paying experts in their field (chat tools in this case) is most of the time the most reliable and cheapest variant. You must also include that Slack has plenty of features that are not available in IRC and mean the productivity is not as good.

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#225

Post by jgtrosh »

valerij wrote: post #221
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OT, but: > 200'000 Interesting. Why an apostrophe?

i've picked up this kind of thousand separation at some point to make large numbers scannable. c.f. 1600000000 1'600'000'000 separating at 10³ is due to counting customs of the region i live in. using an apostrophe `U+0027` appears to be the least wrong use of possible glyphs accessible on my keyboard layout also c++14 does it this way

It's common practice to use commas for this in anglophone countries, but it collisions with french decimal separator; so it's a reasonable choice.

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#226

Post by beatgammit »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #56
ratsimihah wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't internet a single communication medium anyway?

Not really? The internet is literally an internet, i.e. a network that connects networks. You can nearly always find another connection that still works, be it a coffee shop or cellular. Sure, having a single connection is a SPOF, but anyone living in an urban area and anyone with a cellphone (and not using the same cellular carrier for home internet) has more than one connection.

I'm on Google Fi, so theoretically I have redundancy on my phone as well. I have used my phone as a hotspot for work, and I've also gone to other locations to get work done (library, coffee shop, a neighboring company's lobby, etc).

A lot has to go wrong for me to not get work done. If Slack goes down, I use text, email, or Jira comments (in roughly that order of priority). Relying on only one communications method is foolhardy.

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#227

Post by freehunter »

twoquestions wrote: post #119
freehunter wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There should be a way to turn off @here and @channel. It should be a user-level setting, a channel-level setting, and an organization-level setting. Even if my org or channel doesn't opt out, I should be able to.

I know you can in Discord, I'd be shocked if Slack doesn't let you do that. checks Settings Yes, you can mute a channel and suppress @everyone and @here if you want. Still friggin nuts that a chat service can bring a modern machine to it's knees.

Ah I knew you could mute it but muting a channel does not suppress @here. I did more exploring and found it's a multi-step process to suppress @here vs muting, but it is indeed possible.

Learn something new every day.

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#228

Post by freehunter »

fuzz4lyfe wrote: post #133
freehunter wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There should be a way to turn off @here and @channel. It should be a user-level setting, a channel-level setting, and an organization-level setting. Even if my org or channel doesn't opt out, I should be able to.

People at my company use @channel constantly for the most trivial of things its a major pet peeve for me

My work has a 1000+ person channel for ad-hoc support questions that aren't critical and could be answered by anyone. If it's critical, our support team has an SLA, but Slack doesn't.

There was one specific person who would ask a question, expect an immediate response, and if they didn't get the response they would @here. They were instructed not to do that because it pings over 1000 people, so the next time they asked twice in an hour and when they didn't get a response they said "I hate to do this but I really need a response @here". They were kicked from the channel. Really unfortunate since it's a very useful channel to be in, but @here and @channel is just so disruptive in big channels.

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