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Slack is down

status.slack.com

291–300 of 840 posts

Re: Slack is down

#293

I am genuinely surprised that Slack wasn't ready for people to come back from holiday, to view increased queues of unread messages, to have to manually login vs. having auth tokens or cookies, etc. Either that, or they had a cosmically coincidental outage on a really bad Monday to have it. It's bad enough team comms go over Slack so much now, at least we have email fallback. What scares me is for the teams that use S…

We get our primary alerts through Slack. However we also have SMS and phone call backups through PagerDuty

Re: Slack is down

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20948530 is my attempt to demonstrate that implementing a Matrix client is almost as trivial as telnetting to port 6667 on an IRC server, fwiw :)

Re: Slack is down

#296

I don't use Slack that much, but I know plenty of people that work on teams that are probably at a standstill, right now. HN is also pretty slow...

HN becomes slow because people notice a service is down, and go to HN to check for more info. When Google was down for an hour a couple weeks ago, HN became almost unusable.

Re: Slack is down

#299
post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Every time this kind of thing happens HNers love to grip about how the status pages aren't correct yet. It's so weird -- like the people freaking out about the outage are going to be updating their uptime trackers right now or something. Who cares? It'll be fixed later.

what's the point in a status page that only updates after the outage has been resolved?

Re: Slack is down

#300
post #255
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

I didn't realize that Discord has way more active users than Slack. I'm glad, Discord is a fantastic service in my experience. It's a shame they got shoe horned into a mostly gaming oriented service. I've never had a class or worked somewhere where Discord was a considered solution instead of Slack, but I can't think of anything that Slack does better (in my experience). In general, I think Discord has the best audio…

Discord is definitely in the same realm of scale as Slack, and probably bigger (they publish different metrics, so its hard to say for sure).

The really impressive thing about Discord's scale is the size of their subscriber pools in the pub-sub model. Discord is slightly different than Slack in the sense that every User on a Server receives every message from every Channel; you don't opt-in to Channels as in Slack, and you can't opt-out (though some channels can be restricted to only certain roles within the Server, this is the minority of Channels).

Some of the largest Discord servers have over 1 million ONLINE users actively receiving messages; this is mostly the official servers for major games, like Fortnite, Minecraft, and League of Legends.

In other words, while the MAU/DAU counts may be within the same order of magnitude, Discord's DAUs are more centralized into larger servers, and also tend to be members of more servers than an average Slack DAU. Its a far harder problem.

The chat rooms are oftentimes unusable, but most of these users only lurk. Nonetheless, think about that scale for a second; when a user sends a message, it is delivered (very quickly!) to a million people. That's insane. Then combine that with insanely good, low latency audio, and best-in-class stability; Discord is a very impressive product, possibly one of the most impressive, and does not get nearly enough credit for what they've accomplished.

For comparison; a "Team" in Microsoft Teams (roughly equivalent to a Discord Server or Slack Workspace) is still limited to 5,000 people.

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