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Slack is down

status.slack.com

531–540 of 840 posts

Re: Slack is down

#531
post #314
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'…

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...

"Business takes the easy and ethically questionable route to continue making money" news at 11.

I'm not condoning Zoom's actions but this is hardly a problem unique to Zoom. Few if any businesses will stand up for consumers and citizens unless it's directly aligned with their profit motive. In this case, the business choice is to operate or not in mainland China. If they choose to stand up against the Chinese government they're going to have difficulty continuing to operate in China and risk losing that entire market.

Google played this PR game many years ago in China (rejecting some of the governmental policies) and ultimately caved to Chinese policies to do business there.

Businesses are not the organizations we should look to for empowering people, that's simply not their goal no matter how much their marketing team may want to sell that idea by following trending (popular) social movements that they've already done market studies on to assess potential fallback.

Re: Slack is down

#532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if they did that for the US government, which is easier to compel since they are in US territory.

One nation is currently operating concentration camps and arrests and seizes the property of prominent citizens who criticize the government. Are you sure that's an equivalence you want to draw.

yes, I remember when I got my trump kidney from a poor anti-fascist liberal. /s

America is fucked up, that doesn't mean that other countries aren't also fucked up or aren't doing worse things with the data they collect.

Re: Slack is down

#533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the wrong way to look at it. If HN struggles in certain situations then it is not right-sized. You don’t beg of users to walk an unintuitive happy path (i.e. logout when not commenting).

It is “right-sized” if it happens so rarely that it realistically causes no problems.

Rare is not never.

Re: Slack is down

#534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I find it hilarious that the status page is still saying the uptime for the current quarter is 100%. I'd think it'd have lost at least one 9 by any obvious definition of "current quarter".

Maybe it's not updated in real time? I wouldn't publish my teams uptime metrics while a crisis was happening...

Re: Slack is down

#535

My business coworkers are freaking out over Slack being down. But all my technical coworkers are nonplussed. It's interesting how those of us with a technical background are not too disturbed by things breaking.

I'm "plussed," because an app that I manage uses slackclient, and some people depend on it to get paid. Obviously it's my fault for not handling the error, and I hotfixed it, but still, wah.

Re: Slack is down

#536

A great opportunity to try out Element, an open source client for the federated and open Matrix network [1]: https://element.io/ (edit: to clarify: not affiliated in any way, just a fan) [1] https://matrix.org/

I've found that element.io itself is really slow to load.

That said, we're pushing up against the limits of our free plan with Slack and will likely deploy a matrix server in due course.

Re: Slack is down

#537

Just seems slightly disingenuous to me to have "100% uptime" on the same page that says there is a current major outage.

Especially when it's "uptime for the current quarter." A three hour outage since Jan 1 is already a 3% downtime automatically I would think...

Re: Slack is down

#539
post #411

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-...

I was at CF (at new offices, obviously) briefly a couple weeks after 9/11.

They had backups and were able to recover data and systems.

By the time I got there, they were somewhat functional.

The biggest problems were the lack of knowledgeable personnel, not lost data or systems.

Re: Slack is down

#540
post #487
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.

No I'm pretty sure that's just a sort of 'integration', Mattermost shipped with GitLab? https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2015/08/18/gitlab-loves-matter... > Like many companies in the last year we've switched to using Slack to improve internal communication. [...] Since Slack doesn't offer an on-premises version, we searched for other options. We found Mattermost to be the leading open source Slack-alternative and sugge…

Ah I see now, having read more of the history. Calling it that seems pretty misleading/odd.

(We use GitLab and Mattermost (integration) where I work. I've been 'remote / WFH' for the past 7 years.)

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