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Slack is down

status.slack.com

471–480 of 840 posts

Re: Slack is down

#472

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?

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…

This scenario isn't as far fetched as people think. I was running a global deployment in 2012 when hurricane Sandy hit the east cost. The entire eastern seaboard went offline and was off for several days. Some data centers were down for weeks. Our plan had covered that contingency and we failed all of our US traffic to the two west coast regions of amazon. Our downtime on the east cost was around two minutes. Yet a sister company had only one data center in downtown New York, and they were offline for weeks, scrambling to get a backup loaded and online.

Re: Slack is down

#473

Could this be some sort of data corruption? I find it hard to believe that Slack could be down for this long without something that is exceedingly hard to rollback. Even if some services are completely overwhelmed with traffic, they could block a certain percentage of traffic to decrease load, and then force servers up across their datacenters and then unblock traffic. It has the hallmarks to me of some sort of datas…

It hasn't been that long and lots other web services are behaving a bit strangely or are down as well - https://downdetector.com/.

So its probably a wider issue affecting everyone - network level is my guess.

Re: Slack is down

#474

> 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.

For the record, I am logged in and have exchanged messages with at least one other person. The rest of my team does seem to be unable to get in though. Maybe it's because I have just had the Slack tab left open in my browser since before I left for Christmas?

Re: Slack is down

#475
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…

I really agree Discord is amazing and wish I could use it for work instead of Slack.

I think the big things that prevent it from being adopted more for professional use is the lack of a threading model (even though I hate it when people use threads in Slack) and the whole everyone in every channel except for role-based privacy settings. The second one especially is a big deal because you can't do things like team-only channels without a prohibitive amount of overhead.

That said (with zero knowledge of their architecture) I have to feel like both of those missing features aren't too terribly hard to build. Its very likely Discord is growing as a business fast enough on the gaming and community spaces they don't feel the added overhead of expanding into enterprise (read: support, SLAs, SOC, etc) makes sense and are waiting until they need a boost to play that card.

Re: Slack is down

#478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, if you champion FOSS, why would you recommend a proprietary piece of software as fallback?

Maybe my DevOps folks should not be privy to all internal communications? That is one reason we did not go with Mattermost.

If you do not trust your own devops, why are you trusting someone elses devops?

Re: Slack is down

#479
> While the issue is largely still ongoing, we believe some customers may see improvement in connecting to Slack after a refresh (CTRL/CMD + R).

Nice.

Re: Slack is down

#480

> 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.

Well, most outages start with issues that increasingly get worse.

That apparently was also the case here. I started having smaller connectivity issues before it went down completely.

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