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Slack is down

status.slack.com

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Re: Slack is down

#501

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

bitbuilder wrote: post #439
dysfunction wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My coworker's theory was someone was waiting for the holiday's end to deploy something risky. And I'm in that boat of depending on Slack for alerting... in fact my team was also waiting over the holidays to deploy more robust non-Slack-based alerting (in our defense the product is only a few months old and only now starting to scale to any real volume).

I wouldn't be surprised if it's actually a combination of a new feature being recently rolled out, along with the sudden spike in load this morning. The holidays are actually the perfect time for Slack to roll out a risky deployment, as it has to be their lowest usage time. So it would make sense if something was pushed out last week or the week before. And everything probably seemed fine. And then this morning they…

Holidays are a good time for a company to do a risky deployment, but a bad time for an individual employee to do a risky deployment, assuming one doesn't want to work overtime over the holiday fixing things.

Re: Slack is down

#502

Post by davidwparker »

jjice wrote: post #255
013a wrote: 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…

We use Discord exclusively at my day job.

We have a few bots we've integrated with things (deployment, stats, etc).

We use it for all our voice/video calls.

Edit: We've got roles setup well for things like contractors, devs, marketing, etc, so it's easy to lock down different conversations in channels.

It's been fantastic.

The only thing I'm not a huge fan of is the (IMO) poor implementation of threaded discussions.

Edit: it definitely has issues with connectivity from time-to-time too, but not bad overall.

TBH, I'm not sure why companies use Slack (I use it for other organizations, so have experience with it too, but not extensive).

Re: Slack is down

#503

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

t-writescode wrote: post #494
unethical_ban wrote: post #269

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…

Slack has been in business for several years and has survived several December to January transitions, including several people stopping using their product before Christmas and then returning early January. It seems a bit presumptuous to assume that's at fault here, given their age.

Does it? Don't you think their users might be leaning on it more heavily this year due to working from home?

Re: Slack is down

#504

Post by pr0zac »

welterde wrote: post #459
JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For business users, there are regulatory requirements. You need to keep information around for some period of time, but not forever. History and searching is useful for spreading tribal knowledge throughout an organization.

Does that actually extend to Slack/slack-like things though? Since I would see Slack more of a replacement for phone calls or hallway discussions. Neither of which typically has any logs or recordings (and I wouldn't want to work somewhere that did keep such logs).

It does yes. This is why for example message history data export is a paid feature. Its a requirement for certain types of compliance.

Re: Slack is down

#505

Post by twistedpair »

jacques_chester wrote: post #443
blntechie wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, Google plans extensively and runs regular drills. It's hearsay, but I was once told that achieving "black start" capability was a program that took many years and about a billion dollars. But they (probably) have it now.

"black start" for GCP would be something to see. Since the global root keys for Cloud KMS are kept on physical encrypted keys locked safes, accessible to only a few core personnel, that would be interesting, akin to a missile silo launch.

Re: Slack is down

#506

Post by TeMPOraL »

djsumdog wrote: post #116
TeMPOraL wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one obscure reference, I love it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaPkSU8DNfY GILORA: Starfleet code requires a second backup? O'BRIEN: In case the first backup fails. GILORA: What are the chances that both a primary system and its backup would fail at the same time? O'BRIEN: It's very unlikely, but in a crunch I wouldn't like to be caught without a second backup.

I forgot about that. Starfleet really was in good shape back in.

Late 2300s were the golden years for Starfleet and the Federation. Sad to see they went downhill later on.

Re: Slack is down

#507

Post by joshstrange »

pr0zac wrote: post #475
jjice wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-onl…

> I think the big things that prevent it from being adopted more for professional use is the lack of a threading model

They do have a threading model now (if you are talking about replying to a message in a channel and having your reply clearly show what you are responding to). If you are talking about 1-on-1 chats with other people in your same server then yes, that is still lacking IMHO in discord. The whole "you have to be friends" to start a chat (or maybe that's just for a on-the-fly group) is annoying.

Re: Slack is down

#508

Post by sytse »

tempest_ wrote: post #496
ourcat wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point was really that it's GitLab's own product. "GitLab Mattermost" [ https://docs.gitlab.com/omnibus/gitlab-mattermost/ ] I'm amazed they use Slack at all. Let alone as a fallback.

They posted a giant list of the services they use recently. They use a ton of services. Likely you don't want your backup to be one of your systems and another part of the company probably uses Zoom already so it is probably easy to fail over to that.

Here is the list of services that we use https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/business-ops/tech-stack/

This includes many proprietary ones, we generally choose the product that will work best for us, considering the benefits of open source, but not excluding proprietary software.

Mattermost is not part of the single application that GitLab is. There is a good integration between with GitLab and our Omnibus installer allows you to easily install it. But it is a separate application from a separate company.

Re: Slack is down

#509

Post by cheschire »

PACE = Primary, Alternate, Contingency, Emergency

If you haven't been able to justify testing your PACE plan with your bosses lately, now's a great time to go ask again.

Re: Slack is down

#510

Post by mxuribe »

sytse wrote: 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 continue to be impressed by GitLab's operations and documentation! While, yes, others may have similar backup plans, as an outsider, it feels like GitLab's handbook seems cooler even if only for their publishing, and making public of their practices and processes. I'll caveat that I'm not really a fan of zoom/slack/hangouts (I'm an unashamed fanboy of matrix and its numerous clients), but gitlab's approach is still really neat! Kudos to gitlab!
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