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Slack is down

status.slack.com

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Re: Slack is down

#131

Post by curryst »

spicybright wrote: post #51
JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, IRC doesn't do a lot of things Slack does. Where is the logging and audit trails, access control, search, etc.

I'm still dreaming of a world where everyone uses IRC through an interface identical to Slack or Discord or whatever, and features like these are implemented.

I agree in principle, but IRC is a poor way to do this. I love IRC for it's simplicity, but that makes it hard to do more advanced features. It's a text-only protocol (other than DCC), so if you want to do something like allow users to click phone numbers to dial them then you have to regex it and hope for the best. Any kind of link is the same way. If you want to show images inline, you'll have to search for links, then either do another regex to see if the link is an image or prefetch the page to see if it's an image. Most servers still implement user authentication as a secondary service (i.e. it isn't part of the IRC server itself) afaik. I think the newer IRC specs include those, but support for it is missing in many servers.

Really a huge part of IRC's difficulty and beauty is in not having a markup language, but most of that beauty is for the eyes of the developer, not the user.

I like the concept of Matrix. That's kind of what they're trying to do by creating an open protocol, but when I looked at implementing a client it was non-trivial. For IRC, you can usually send someone a telnet log of you joining an IRC server and they could implement a client. I don't get the impression that that's true for Matrix.

Re: Slack is down

#133

Post by ghostpepper »

saxonww wrote: post #50
ceejayoz wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be shocked if businesses saw increased productivity during these.

I have less of an excuse not to be more personally productive, but I can't help anyone else (easily) if my primary method of communication is down. Not only because it's harder to contact you, but also because it's impossible for you to just ask in a channel and have me notice you. There's also this perverse incentive to Slack all the things. Lots of CI notifications are sent through it. Some org processes are implem…

Particularly on a Monday morning after a holiday, there are tasks that I know I need to be working on but cannot because relevant details were never transposed from slack to our actual work scheduling tools like google docs, jira, etc. and I cannot access Slack history.

Re: Slack is down

#135

Post by postalrat »

dbbk wrote: post #127
derwiki wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Of course there are other things to do. But the things I had planned for the morning are all being delayed.

Re: Slack is down

#136

Post by exhaze »

nkassis wrote: post #105
exhaze wrote: 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".

I would bet it's just the influx of traffic post holiday with systems that haven't been updated in so long maybe some annoying memory leaks have crept up and gone unnoticed or some other bad state that was exacerbated by return to work day for most NA folks. Code freezes were good at identifying bugs that only show up after long periods. Doubt anyone releasing big changes Monday morning.

I haven't worked at Slack, so I can't speak with high confidence. A traffic spike is a possible reason, but I'm willing to bet that it's not the reason:

> Doubt anyone releasing big changes Monday morning.

This is definitely an engineering best practice, and by best practice, I mean something that Uber's, I mean Slack's SRE team strongly pushed for, and got politely overruled on. After a code freeze is lifted, it's quite common for lots of promotion-eager engineers to release big changes.

Re: Slack is down

#138

Post by rwc »

exhaze wrote: 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".

Seems to be more than that. Even slack.com in an incognito browser fails.

Re: Slack is down

#139

Post by swsieber »

jrockway wrote: post #44
schoolornot wrote: post #8

How many more outages until all trust is eroded and competing services differentiate themselves on the basis of uptime?

I say this every time Slack is down, but they just seem so shady to me. Nobody can connect right now, and their status site says "100% uptime in the last quarter". Maybe it's close to 100%, but it ain't 100%. I think we should push for a metric where "up" means 100% of people that want to use the service are able to use the service. If 1% of users can't send messages, then that should count as a full-blown outage and…

Some companies do this, though probably not publishing data. Any customer downtime is treated the same - for one, for many, for all (in theory, ha ha). But they take it pretty seriously.

Re: Slack is down

#140

Post by brundolf »

exhaze wrote: post #126
exhaze wrote: 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, t…

Sudden surge of traffic as all their users returns to work?
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