Live data from Hacker News

Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

status.slack.com

121–130 of 278 posts

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#121
post #52

Previous outages: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16108912 - 5 months ago (longer discussion) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15597461 - 7 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15597431 - 8 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13811815 - 1 year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10616743 - 3 years ago

In light of how Slack and other companies haven't been able to get a decent level of uptime, I have to say, the company known to make huge web applications that don't go down in shame every couple of months is probably Google. I can't remember the last time Gmail was down. It just works! If google is down, probably your internet is down.

Their expertise and discipline in distributed applications is unrivaled. I'm guessing because they have datacenters everywhere with huge fat pipes in between, and their SREs are probably top notch who don't take shortcuts.

Google gets a whole bunch of things wrong at times, but somethings I gotta say, they've nailed it.

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#122
post #114

It's interesting to me that the update messages are posted every 30 minutes from 1st notification until resolution. Judging by this and every other outage I assume this is automatic, and probably implemented to appease the people who are probably frustrated by the outage. https://status.slack.com/2018-06/142edcb9e52c7663

We have a similar policy at $WORK (but manual). In our experience customers go mental if you say absolutely nothing.

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#126

Maybe unrelated, but my AWS-hosted websockets-using app had an outage starting at the same time. Also a third-party API provider we use for handling inbound phone calls. So this smells like a wider outage than just Slack.

That's interesting. More speculation: they haven't given any detail in 2 hours, perhaps if it's an upstream/3rd-party problem, they haven't been given any info.

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#127
post #84
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say this as someone who almost always prefers the dark theme wherever it is available: I wonder how much this desire for dark interfaces comes from almost every app interface having bright colors on white. Somewhere along the shift to flat design, grays and non-bright colors have been ignored in the visual design of applications.

In civil engineering circles, it's known that a room which is too bright will cause eye strain and fatigue. There is an optimal level of light for the eyes to be most effective. But the computer makers and UI designers don't take this into account. Dark themes transmit less light to the eyes, causing less fatigue over time.

The trick is this" if you look into a bright light you cant see the rest of the room anymore. Its a kind of forced feeding. Not that the designers of our world are guilty of some sinister CONSPIRACY. They simply see awful-white as the only choice based on tests or they are just imitating what they know.

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#128
post #3

It's times like this I wish there was a solid decentralized standard to pick from, but there's no clear choice between XMPP and Matrix.

It's not about the protocols, it's about having a client with a user experience that is acceptable to an entire company rather than just a team of engineers. Which decentralized protocol has such a client? (Speaking as someone who got burned trying to advocate for IRC at a company that eventually and inevitably switched to Slack.)

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Native emoji support, aesthetically pleasing front-ends, and clear product direction are some of the main positives I see, even if the combination of php on the backend and electron on the frontend aren't the most sophisticated technical components in history. I prefer decentralized and open things, but a cohesive vision can sometimes provide a better user experience across a more restricted set of functionality than…

Offline messaging, mobile clients, push notifications, history, search, rich text formatting, message editing, file transfer, etc etc etc

..., inline images, display names, deleting messages, editing messages, reactions, avatars, multi-user private messages, etc etc etc
Post reply on HN