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Slack was down

status.slack.com

91–100 of 243 posts

Re: Slack was down

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're upvoted because people can't resist making the same tired "see? we are over-reliant on {Slack,Github,Cloudflare,etc}!" comments.

My favorite are the conspiracy theories as to why the outages are seemingly so close together in this Summer of 2019. All kinds of imaginative reasons abound. My best guess is summer vacation :) it's at least true for my company who was one of the featured outages

My best guess is that "sequencing creates narratives." It's like in baseball, how a player who hits .333 over the season will have 0-10 and 10-10 stretches where he either can't hit everything or demolishes every pitch he sees. You'll often see sports news come up with stories for why this is happening, and most of the time it's just "this is how statistics work".

TL;dr- complex systems are complex, and trying to understand them isn't usually possible for outside parties.

Re: Slack was down

#92
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then take a look at https://zulipchat.com/ for something that sucks less, and is open source software. I really want to like Zulip Chat. It has everything all the alternatives have + self-hosting, but as soon as they switched to their Electron client, it has become yet another resource hog that I have to put up with. I already have to put up with 10+ electron apps slowing down my Macbook. I shouldn't have to make s…

10+ electron apps seems excessive, what other Electron apps are you running? I think Slack is the only one I'm running (that I know of)

I would guess from my experience with my colleagues that they're running at a minimum vscode and some kind of electron git app.

Re: Slack was down

#93
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't really matter how open and federated email is if all mail in/out of your mailbox has to go through one provider. If my company's Exchange server went down, email would stop. Likewise for Internet service... if my local AT&T connection went down, it doesn't matter how open and resilient the Internet is, I'm not getting online until it's fixed.

When this happens I just switch to tethering from my cell phone. Redundant enough.

So when Slack is down, just text your coworkers. Problem solved.

Re: Slack was down

#94
post #66
post #16

If you're a community driven project or organization using Slack, then take a look at https://zulipchat.com/ for something that sucks less, and is open source software. I've found it much more pleasant to use and less buggy than Slack.

> then take a look at https://zulipchat.com/ for something that sucks less, and is open source software. I really want to like Zulip Chat. It has everything all the alternatives have + self-hosting, but as soon as they switched to their Electron client, it has become yet another resource hog that I have to put up with. I already have to put up with 10+ electron apps slowing down my Macbook. I shouldn't have to make s…

There's a terminal client for it: https://github.com/zulip/zulip-terminal

Re: Slack was down

#95

Now we can put slack into the list of Major league tech companies which cannot keep the services up and running 24/7. Cloudflare Facebook and its group of companies Azure cloud Google Cloud , twitter etc etc AWS, eyes are you now :)

S3 went down for nearly an entire workday a few years ago. It legit pretty much broke everything. We all went home because there was no way to do any work.

Re: Slack was down

#96
post #68
post #16

If you're a community driven project or organization using Slack, then take a look at https://zulipchat.com/ for something that sucks less, and is open source software. I've found it much more pleasant to use and less buggy than Slack.

Wish we wouldn’t use such language, “sucks less” is highly subjective and your opinion but we don’t need to disparage Slack in order to make a point that alternatives like Zulip are available. Seems like especially poor tone on an outage thread... “Don’t kick them while they’re down” or something?

They're a $17 billion company. They'll be just fine.

Re: Slack was down

#97
post #68
post #16

If you're a community driven project or organization using Slack, then take a look at https://zulipchat.com/ for something that sucks less, and is open source software. I've found it much more pleasant to use and less buggy than Slack.

Wish we wouldn’t use such language, “sucks less” is highly subjective and your opinion but we don’t need to disparage Slack in order to make a point that alternatives like Zulip are available. Seems like especially poor tone on an outage thread... “Don’t kick them while they’re down” or something?

[deleted]

Re: Slack was down

#98
post #88

Is it really that hard to spin up an IRC server for moments like these? I too have had to switch to Skype communications today. I wish people used IRC in the first place so I could write my own bots.

problem is, non devs don't use IRC.

Re: Slack was down

#99
post #57

Slightly offtopic : As a remote engineer, I wonder if half-duplex voice (kind of like a CB radio) would be superior for communication vs typing everything? E.g. when I have an idea, I just talk, that comment is recorded and made available to the chat room. I'd like to get back some of the nuance of language that just isn't possible with text. There'd have to be some easy way of playing back the voice snippets in orde…

This is very common on WeChat, from what I can tell most people communicate with voice snippets.

Re: Slack was down

#100

I really don't like the heavy dependence on Slack that my (and a lot of other) company has. The outage is frustrating.

My deploy on our staging environment fails because the bot can't post the deployment status update on Slack, so yeah, there's that.

...sounds like you need to revisit your CI pipeline. Your build shouldn't fail when your chat tool is down.
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