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Slack is down

status.slack.com

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Re: Slack is down

#221

Post by 013a »

lol768 wrote: 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.

Its especially strange when you think about how unoriginal Slack's product domain is, and how comparable, and in some cases small, their userbase is.

* iMessage, which likely handles something in the range of 750M-1B monthly actives.

* WhatsApp, 2B users [1], though no clarity on "active" users.

* Telegram, 400M monthly actives [2]

* Discord, 100M monthly actives [3]

* Slack, 12M daily actives [4]

* Teams, which is certainly more popular than Slack, but I shudder to list it because its stability may actually be worse.

The old piece of wisdom that "real-time chat is hard" is something I've always taken at face-value as being true, because it is hard, but some of the most stable, highest scale services I've ever interfaced with are chat services. iMessage NEVER goes down. I have to conclude that Slack's unacceptable instability, even relative to more static services like Jira, is less the product of the difficulty of their product domain, and moreso something far deeper and more unfixable.

I would not assume that this will improve after they are fully integrated with Salesforce. If your company is on Slack, its time to investigate an alternative, and I'm fearful of the fact that there are very few strong ones in the enterprise world.

[1] https://blog.whatsapp.com/two-billion-users-connecting-the-w...

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/24/telegram-hits-400-million-...

[3] https://wersm.com/discord-reaches-100m-monthly-active-users-...

[4] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/10/slack-says-it-crossed-12-mil... (this was also announced on Slack's blog, but that's down).

Re: Slack is down

#222

Post by itisit »

joeblau wrote: post #95

I have friends at many multi-billion dollar companies who are all just twiddling their thumbs right now.

Me too. Although that's occurring irrespective of Slack's system status.

Re: Slack is down

#223

Post by keehun »

Assuming this is a bad deployment--not hardware/network issues: It will be interesting to read their post-mortem, on why rollback still has not happened yet after 2 hours of outage. You would hope that a service the level/popularity of Slack would plan for deployment-related outages and be able to roll back a deployment.

Re: Slack is down

#224

Post by ghostpepper »

DarkContinent wrote: post #171
scrose wrote: post #162

I find it amazing that we can be about an hour and a half into a service being completely unusable(ie. Slack telling me it 'cannot connect'), yet it's still marked as an 'incident' instead of an 'outage' in their own status page

It's marked as an outage now.

and yet they're still proudly proclaiming: "Uptime for the current quarter: 100%"

Re: Slack is down

#225

Post by beamatronic »

Thaxll wrote: post #156
exhaze wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 q…

You just don't deploy something major the first day after a 2 weeks vacation, it does not makes any sense.

It depends on the goal you’re trying to accomplish. Are you going for a promotion or bonus? Or instead is your goal to maximize uptime?

Re: Slack is down

#226

Post by jdc0589 »

someonehere wrote: post #161

Well, there goes the credibility one team has in arguing that Slack makes a great knowledge repository.

people actually argue this? slack is a great coms tool, and great BACKUP if you can't find something in a real documentation/knowledge/etc.. repository.

Re: Slack is down

#227

Post by davesque »

Considering how ubiquitous slack use seems to be in a lot of major tech companies, I wonder if it's reasonable to ask whether or not the stock market's performance this morning is somehow correlated?

Re: Slack is down

#228

Post by itisit »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #166

My biggest frustration with these outages is they're hard outages across all of Slack. There's no reasonable work arounds or fallback features. A plaintext web interface would keep my team moving along while they resolve their issues.

The joys of multi-tenancy.

Re: Slack is down

#229

Post by aeyes »

exhaze wrote: post #175
Aperocky wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Uber/Slack not release in CI/CD? At least in backend? I don't see any need to deploy a big change at once in the software world today. At worst feature gate the thing you want to do and run it in a beta environment, but still push the actual code down the pipeline.

> run it in a beta environment Every Uber/ex-Uber engineer is nervously chuckling at this comment right now

For those that don't know what this comment is about: https://eng.uber.com/multitenancy-microservice-architecture/

Re: Slack is down

#230

Post by rocho »

ProAm wrote: post #201
nicioan wrote: post #195

Funny how status.slack.com has reported Incidents and Outages for a while now, but still the "Uptime for the current quarter" is reported at 100% on the bottom right of the status table.

One of those affects money via SLA's. Slack is still up, just not usable.

Up means working. It does not mean that something is displayed on the screen.
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