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Slack is down

status.slack.com

121–130 of 840 posts

Re: Slack is down

#121
post #89

When I was at Uber, we noticed that most incidents are directly caused by human actions that modify the state of the system. Therefore, a large "backlog" of human actions that modify the system state have a much higher chance of causing an incident. My bet is that this incident is caused by a big release after a post-holiday "code freeze".

This is very likely a broken release. The timing lines up with pacific time too well.

Re: Slack is down

#122
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I see all green checks on the AWS Status page. I'm sure you know this already, but that status page isn't worth the cycles on your CPU, you would be better served asking the toaster if AWS is functioning properly than checking that status page.

Of course, yeah, but at least you can sometimes see a yellow and infer it really means red :/.

yellow requires an issue that every customer is aware of and red requires a thermonuclear strike.

Re: Slack is down

#123
status page says apps / API are fine yet am trying to work on a slack app but can't cause of these error, a bit annoying

edit: it is now showing as a total outage on the status page

Re: Slack is down

#124
post #89

When I was at Uber, we noticed that most incidents are directly caused by human actions that modify the state of the system. Therefore, a large "backlog" of human actions that modify the system state have a much higher chance of causing an incident. My bet is that this incident is caused by a big release after a post-holiday "code freeze".

[deleted]

Re: Slack is down

#125
post #17

These events seem to be happening almost on a monthly basis now. IRC was never this unreliable and at least with netsplits it was obvious what had happened because you'd see the clients disconnect. IME messages just fail to send with Slack, then you can retry but they're not properly idempotent and you end up sending the messages twice. It's really poor.

Our company uses Cliq. I wouldn't say that it's as good as Slack, but it's probably 80-90%, and even has a few unique features (integration into Zoho's suite, remote work checkin, integrated bot development environment, etc)

Re: Slack is down

#126
post #89

When I was at Uber, we noticed that most incidents are directly caused by human actions that modify the state of the system. Therefore, a large "backlog" of human actions that modify the system state have a much higher chance of causing an incident. My bet is that this incident is caused by a big release after a post-holiday "code freeze".

To elaborate a bit more on this point, you have to think about it like any complex system failure - it's almost never one thing, but rather a combination of many different factors. The factors around post NYE releases:

- high risk changes that weren't released pre-holidays get released. Depending on the company, this could mean a 1-week to 1-month delay between implementation and release. The greater that interval, the higher the divergence world of production and the world of the new feature

- lots of new hires (new year = new hiring budget). New hires are missing some tribal knowledge about the system and make a production-breaking release.

I tried to think of other reasons, but these two overwhelmingly stand out as the two biggest reasons. Would love to hear from others.

Re: Slack is down

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sitting here not sure if I should deploy code since most communication with the rest of my team has been cut off.

If something went awry, and it caused more pain because Slack was down, how would you feel? If you’re missing comms/observability then waiting to deploy seems prudent.

So the answer is... people should stop working?

Re: Slack is down

#128

I'm migrating to Rocket.chat on Digital Ocean as we speak. Has anyone else made the move or tested Rocket.chat?

My old company used a mix of Slack and RocketChat. Functionally, it's fine but I was never a big fan of the UI and how attachments were handled. Also, cross-channel search was kinda bad. Mind you, this was well over a year ago so I'm sure things have improved.

Re: Slack is down

#129
post #17

These events seem to be happening almost on a monthly basis now. IRC was never this unreliable and at least with netsplits it was obvious what had happened because you'd see the clients disconnect. IME messages just fail to send with Slack, then you can retry but they're not properly idempotent and you end up sending the messages twice. It's really poor.

My feeling is this is an AWS issue. Our services hosted in AWS are not working either.

I thought Slack was not on AWS, but Oracle.
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