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Slack is down

status.slack.com

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Re: Slack is down

#411

Post by teagee »

blntechie wrote: post #332

I have always had this fantasy thinking of what happens when outages of one of these major service never come back online i.e. in this outage Slack loses info of all the accounts, users, messages etc. How would people react? What would engineers do to recover? I always found that idea fascinating. Imagine Google saying tomorrow that they lost all the accounts and emails. What kind of impact the world will have?

This reminds me of what happened to the financial services Cantor Fitzgerald after 9/11, just replacing a system with hundreds of lost employees:

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/19/magazine/the-secret-life-...

Re: Slack is down

#412

Post by lawrjone »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #375
lawrjone wrote: post #336

Having been in this situation before, with a totally-down-and-not-coming-back-up outage of a payments system, I really feel for their incident response team. I'll take this moment to remind everyone of their human tendency to read meaning into random events. There's no evidence to suggest New Year traffic has caused this, and outages like this can happen in spite of professional and competent preparation. Hugops for…

> I'll take this moment to remind everyone of their human tendency to read meaning into random events. There's no evidence to suggest New Year traffic has caused this, and outages like this can happen in spite of professional and competent preparation. On the one hand, sure we don't specifically know what's going on. On the other hand, it's the first Monday in the new year and they went down shortly after the start o…

There are a load of ways NY might have contributed to this, but it may not be a direct cause. What's more likely, Slack forgetting to scale their deployment back up after too much mulled wine, or a number of people on holiday meaning a simple failure has developed into something more serious?

It could be anything really- my post was more about how situations like this can happen to even the most prepared. The assumption it has something to do with NY tends to assume very trivial, silly mistakes. Especially with no information, that seems a bit uncharitable.

Re: Slack is down

#413

Post by ChrisRR »

tshaddox wrote: post #380
ARandomerDude wrote: post #281

> Customers may have trouble connecting or using Slack I can't stand how marketing speak pervades every sphere of the world. Their entire system is offline (inconvenient certainly, but it happens) and they can't bring themselves to say "Slack is down. We're working on it and will be back ASAP." or something similar. Instead we may have trouble.

Why do you consider that to be "marketing speak?" It appears to be concise, direct, and accurate. The phrase "Slack is down," even if true by some interpretations (it hasn't been "completely down" from what I have seen), is imprecise and informal.

Because it's not that you "may" have trouble

If their service is down, you will have trouble. The service will be absolutely inaccessible. Don't give people hope with "may"

Re: Slack is down

#415

Post by cozzyd »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #281

> Customers may have trouble connecting or using Slack I can't stand how marketing speak pervades every sphere of the world. Their entire system is offline (inconvenient certainly, but it happens) and they can't bring themselves to say "Slack is down. We're working on it and will be back ASAP." or something similar. Instead we may have trouble.

I did manage to receive a message a few minutes ago, so it might be just mostly dead.

Re: Slack is down

#417

Post by noir_lord »

fermienrico wrote: post #353
_6fmb wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What an overwrought headline, the employee in question has already been fired.

The optics are still very, very bad for Zoom. I have zero trust in them.

There are remarkably few organisations I somewhat trust (even then on a sliding scale) but on that spectrum Zoom sits at the "wouldn't touch them with someone elses bargepole" end.

Re: Slack is down

#418

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

pluto9 wrote: post #360
blibble wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It doesn't. The status page is currently showing information about the outage. And the 100% uptime number is probably still correct, since it's only been out for a couple of hours.

> And the 100% uptime number is probably still correct, since it's only been out for a couple of hours.

It's listed as "Uptime for the current quarter"; if they mean that as "calendar quarter", i.e. since the start of the year, then we aren't even 100 hours into the quarter so we should be well below 100% by now.

Re: Slack is down

#419

Post by alisonkisk »

_6fmb wrote: post #343
bww wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a reminder that it's probably not a wise idea for anyone to get further in bed with Zoom than they already are. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/18/zoom-he...

What an overwrought headline, the employee in question has already been fired.

The company in question is still operating. We don't know if the employee was just a scapegoat.

Re: Slack is down

#420

Post by glouwbug »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #307
ryanSrich wrote: post #266

This is actually impressive, in a bad way. I just have become so used to being able to run highly resilient cross region infrastructure for millions of users with just a handful of people that I forget what real downtime looks like. For their app to just go completely offline is unacceptable. Bugs and degraded services I get. But this is catastrophic.

I can't even begin to guess what went wrong. What are your guesses? How many screaming executives are there at Slack saying "just roll it back"?

Well, they did hand off slack to Salesforce
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