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Slack is down

status.slack.com

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Re: Slack is down

#831

Post by stormcode »

irrational wrote: post #738
wrycoder wrote: post #698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm 79, born in the mid-west, living in New England for the last 60 years. Worked in tech. I've never heard the word used except as in Def. 1.

I've never lived in the mid-west or the New England region of the USA. Maybe it's a regional usage (I've lived in Florida, Texas, California, Colorado, Utah, Oregon, and Washington). I'm not sure where I picked up my usage from. My dad is from Colorado and my mom from California. Maybe I picked it up from one of them ;-)

I'm from New England, I grew up with the informal definition and was super surprised when I heard the formal one.

Re: Slack is down

#832

Post by feanaro »

zenexer wrote: post #786
feanaro wrote: post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's weird that you're calling it Vector when it's now called Element and it was called Riot for years before that.

The constant rebranding and confusion over Matrix/Vector/Riot/Element is another point of pain for me. It’s incredibly difficult to communicate unambiguously about Matrix with people who haven’t been following it for years. Does Element refer to the ecosystem as a whole, including EMS? The primary client? The core federation? It’s not obvious from a casual visit to element.io. I suppose if I said “Element web app,” t…

Everything related to the company formerly known as New Vector is now called Element. The company is Element, the official clients are called Element (with suffixes Web, Desktop, Android, iOS) and yes, EMS is Element Matrix Services. This rebranding was done specifically due to the confusion brought on by the many previous names. More info here: https://element.io/previously-riot

The protocol is still called Matrix.

Re: Slack is down

#833

Post by binaryblitz »

lwedel wrote: post #377
exhaze wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To elaborate a bit more on this point, you have to think about it like any complex system failure - it's almost never one thing, but rather a combination of many different factors. The factors around post NYE releases: - high risk changes that weren't released pre-holidays get released. Depending on the company, this could mean a 1-week to 1-month delay between implementation and release. The greater that interval, t…

I would add here the potential scaling issue - holidays were a dry season - less meeting. So if they have some automation for scaling down to reduce cost, it may have bitten them in their arses now. People came back to work, and most of them start around the same time (US wise at least). Hence kids - a vital lesson for all of us - don't start the call at a full hour, give it 3-7 min to make your coworkers confused an…

I hope this isn't the case. It's not like this is the first holiday season for slack.

Re: Slack is down

#834

Post by networkimprov »

thesuitonym wrote: post #822
networkimprov wrote: post #689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's largely overlooked that the success of Slack & MS Teams is partly due to the cybercrime portal that email has become. IOW, you don't get phished in your org's Slack chats. To prevent phishing, any chat service will suffice; an open protocol isn't necessary, as you don't intend to engage with ppl outside your org. The essential problem IMO is how to replace SMTP. No one has proposed and implemented an alternative…

You're making some fundamental assumptions about federation that I think are completely wrong. Are you telling me that you never need to communicate with anyone outside of your organization? How do you intend to receive invoices? How will you communicate with outside vendors? Sorry, but you need some text-based way of communicating with people and email is the best way, that's why it's survived so long despite being…

There are two ways to communicate with ppl outside your org without federation (this is covered on the website):

1) Set up a second TMTP service where customers and/or suppliers can create accounts, along with employees who need to interact with them.

2) Have some employees join a third-party service which is open to all involved in your field. There is a risk of phishing in this case, but:

. a) anyone you haven't previously contacted is limited to short, plain-text communications to you (see Ping in protocol), and

. b) such third-party services would typically charge a fee to members and impose a small cost per-ping, and

. c) you know that you're dealing with unknown entities with possibly malicious intent.

TMTP clients support active logins to accounts on any number of TMTP servers, just as browsers support multiple active connections to websites.

Re: Slack is down

#835

Post by zenexer »

feanaro wrote: post #832
zenexer wrote: post #786

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The constant rebranding and confusion over Matrix/Vector/Riot/Element is another point of pain for me. It’s incredibly difficult to communicate unambiguously about Matrix with people who haven’t been following it for years. Does Element refer to the ecosystem as a whole, including EMS? The primary client? The core federation? It’s not obvious from a casual visit to element.io. I suppose if I said “Element web app,” t…

Everything related to the company formerly known as New Vector is now called Element. The company is Element, the official clients are called Element (with suffixes Web, Desktop, Android, iOS) and yes, EMS is Element Matrix Services. This rebranding was done specifically due to the confusion brought on by the many previous names. More info here: https://element.io/previously-riot The protocol is still called Matrix.

Yes, I actually like the change—I think they finally got it right this time. (The Riot rebranding was a mess.) However, it’s still frustrating when trying to communicate with people who aren’t following Matrix-related news. In my circle of friends, “Vector” remains more widely understood than “Element Web,” so that’s what I’ve been using.

Anyway, my point stands: Element Web/Desktop feels fairly unresponsive compared to something like Telegram Desktop. It looks so much nicer now, the UI layout is great, and it’s far more powerful than Telegram—yet, I can’t help but feel like I’m swimming through molasses even when dealing with moderately-sized groups. Try clicking around on different groups rapidly; you’ll likely find that you have to wait several seconds for the UI to update.

Re: Slack is down

#836

Post by JohnBooty »

Unklejoe wrote: post #823
JohnBooty wrote: post #781

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and use it to communicate with a group of about 20 friends. Most of them aren't "technical" people. I'm insanely curious about the human side of things here. How did you get them to buy into this idea in the first place? That sounds like quite an achievement. The non-technical folks in my life generally struggle with paths of least resistance (iMessage, etc) and it's hard to imagine getting them onto some alternative…

It did take some persuading. I think the main reason I was able to pull it off was ironically because they're not that technical. I bet most of my friends don't even know what Slack or Discord is. That's not to say they're dumb or anything - they just don't spend as much time online as one would think. Previously, we were mostly using group texts or Snapchat/Instagram to communicate, so the biggest selling point was…

That's interesting. Thank you for sharing that!

Re: Slack is down

#837

Post by rexreed »

win_ini wrote: post #790
rexreed wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suggested RocketChat when the outage was announced and HN community downvoted it quite heavily. I'm not sure why. [0] We ended making the switch and committed to Discord. We're now looking at Rocket.chat as a backup in case Discord goes down. But Slack is now completely out of the picture for our team. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25633047

Just curious - why not use Matternost as a backup? (disclosure: I work at Mattermost, but really just want to know what you think) I’ve advocated for an idea where Mattermost is to be used as a “bunker” where it is hosted on a raspberry Pi (or somewhere else) and acts as a digital bunker if your critical infrastructure (slack, teams, exchange?) is compromised somehow.

Interesting! I never looked into it, but now I will!

Re: Slack is down

#838

Post by helper »

helper wrote: post #638
jrockway wrote: post #44

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…

That number is almost certainly updated manually. Check back tomorrow and see what it says. If you look at the history page you can see its not 100% for every month: https://status.slack.com/calendar

(2 days later) The status site now shows %99.9 uptime for the quarter.

Re: Slack is down

#839

Post by adambyrtek »

iso1631 wrote: post #813
adambyrtek wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt that regularly releasing breaking changes that reduce uptime is a good strategy to get a bonus or promotion.

Assume promotion after releasing 10 changes Releasing 1 change a year with a 100% chance of working -- no promotion for 10 years Releasing 10 changes a year each with a 10% chance of breaking something -- 1 in 3 chance of promotion in a year, and a 2 in 3 chance of downtime

> Assume promotion after releasing 10 changes

Where did that assumption come from? Also are you claiming that it takes 10x more time to release a non-breaking change?

Re: Slack is down

#840

Post by someonehere »

jdc0589 wrote: post #226
someonehere wrote: post #161

Well, there goes the credibility one team has in arguing that Slack makes a great knowledge repository.

people actually argue this? slack is a great coms tool, and great BACKUP if you can't find something in a real documentation/knowledge/etc.. repository.

Where I work yes. Small and scrappy devs who when asked to move knowledge into a Confluence or wiki page, argue that’s it’s too much work to find everything they need. They can just type in the channel they want to search in with a term and get the conversation they need.

My response is if it’s important long term, it needs to be somewhere visible and exportable should the platform change. As it is now, Slack exports are horrible and large.

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