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Slack is down

status.slack.com

421–430 of 840 posts

Re: Slack is down

#421

> 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.

"We're experiencing increased service degradation" is so 201x-ish

Re: Slack is down

#422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google would be catastrophic because so much is stored there. Slack is mostly real time communication, at least for me. There are a few bits and bobs that really should be documented that are in the messages though.

Yeah, Google would easily top the list of companies which can have catastrophic impact. Microsoft, Apple, Salesforce, Dropbox would be the next in the list I guess if we leave out the utility companies and internet providers etc.

Just look at the impact a 40 minute outage of Google Auth had last month, I wouldn't be surprised if the global productivity hit during that outage was in the billions of dollars, and that was for a relatively short outage without any data loss.

Re: Slack is down

#423
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You'll just end up with no SLA or pay a hefty amount to use services because that's an impossible standard to support for any service of a size like this.

I'm not demanding 100% uptime, I'm asking that they say "99.94% uptime" when there has been an outage.

Honestly, I could live with a 99.50% SLA, if that's what it really was. After today's probably full-day outage, they'd just have to be extra careful for the rest of the year (or pay me money). Kind of sucks when it's 1/4 that you blow your year's SLA budget though.

Re: Slack is down

#424
post #258

At GitLab our fallback from Slack is Zoom https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/communication/#emergency-c... I'm posting this because I found a lot of people don't know that Zoom includes a complete chat client that includes channels. And #HugOps to the engineers at Slack working on this. I appreciate that they posted a periodic update even when there was no news to report: "There are no changes to report as of yet. We'…

[deleted]

Re: Slack is down

#425
post #258

At GitLab our fallback from Slack is Zoom https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/communication/#emergency-c... I'm posting this because I found a lot of people don't know that Zoom includes a complete chat client that includes channels. And #HugOps to the engineers at Slack working on this. I appreciate that they posted a periodic update even when there was no news to report: "There are no changes to report as of yet. We'…

I'm quite surprised that you don't use Mattermost as a 'Slack fallback' at GitLab.

Re: Slack is down

#426
post #389

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?

It would be a mass customer extinction event for said service, and would effectively result in a windfall for competing services

Services like Slack are replaceable to most extent. How does even replace a service like Google easily? There are like to like services available for Google but the data is where it becomes tricky. Almost 1bn people losing their email addresses could cause massive issues.

Re: Slack is down

#427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

But 1) it has apparently not been the case that the service was "absolutely inaccessible" and 2) "Slack is down" is still very imprecise and not a great alternative even if the service had been "absolutely inaccessible."

Re: Slack is down

#428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That scenario is what Disaster Recovery plans are for. Every large company I've worked for has had recovery plans in place, including scenarios as disturbing as "All data centers and offices explode simultaneously, and all staff who know how it all works are killed in the blasts." You not only have backups in place, you have documentation in place, including a back-up vendor who has copies of the documentation and ca…

That’s some really good thoughts on DR planning. I have never thought DR to be to such an extent. How many companies really plan for an event where their entire infrastructure goes offline and their entire team gets killed? Does even companies like Google plan for this kind of event?

The two I've worked for that took it that far were a Federal bank, and an energy company. I have no idea how far Google or other large software companies take their plans.

But based on my experience, the initial recovery planning is the hard part. The documentation to tell a new team how to do it isn't so painful once the base plan exists, although you do need to think ahead to make sure somebody at your back-up vendor has an account with enough access to set up all the other accounts that will need to be created, including authorization to spend money to make it happen.

Re: Slack is down

#429

For a product that is so simple, there are no good self-hosted alternatives. Mattermost and RocketChat are written very poorly, reliability and getting your data out is impossible. Slack goes down so often we're thinking of writing a very boring clone that uses ActiveMQ and MySQL, just because chat should be boring and needs to "just work".

I was just considering setting up a Mattermost instance for our company since I used it for a year at a previous job without any issues (I was just a user though, I didn't deploy or maintain it). Just curious, why do you think it's poorly written or unreliable?

Re: Slack is down

#430
post #370
post #245

This site seems to be lagging as well. Or is it just me?

It isn’t just you, but due to Hacker News’ right-sized[0] infrastructure, you should sign out unless you need to comment. That way you hit the caches instead of getting the server to make you a new page. 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12911461

Is this still true? Asking because that comment from dang is 4 years old.
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