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Slack is down for some users

status.slack.com

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Re: Slack is down for some users

#121

Post by rajbot »

jjice wrote: post #107

Whenever I see a product this large having an outage (a lot recently, especially with Facebook, GCP, and AWS), I can only think of how stressful it must be for whoever needs to fix it. I've been on the other side of the outage before, albeit with a much smaller product, but lord was that stressful. Thinking about the random engineers that are stressed out and thinking that they could be fired for this, even if the ca…

I work at Slack and have learned a lot from our Incident Response program. Brent Chapman helped put it together, and has a USENIX talk about it here: https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon21/presentation/chap...

Response for this incident went by the book, as described in Brent's talk above. Incident Management programs like these ensure that incidents can be resolved while also minimizing stress and chaos for engineers and other responders.

PagerDuty has a good Incident Responder and Incident Commander training courses, if you are interested in setting up a program similar to Slack's:

- https://response.pagerduty.com/training/courses/incident_res...

- https://response.pagerduty.com/training/incident_commander/

Fun fact: Brent Chapman is also known for creating the `majordomo` mailing list manager from the early 90s

Re: Slack is down for some users

#122

Post by thamer »

schnevets wrote: post #109
johnward wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love slack. Slack search is terrible for me, but maybe it's the quality of data it has to search through.

I'm curious about how many users are on your organization's Slack. I consider it one of my go-to sources for my org that has had between 250-300 people for the past 3 years. I can see it being suboptimal for a bigger company, though.

I'm in an organization with many thousands of people and find search to work very well.

Does the pricing plan influence the amount of resources your organization can use? e.g. slow search on the free plan, but much better on Enterprise Grid.

Re: Slack is down for some users

#123

Post by bmhin »

treesknees wrote: post #114
Cerium wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack does a good job with threading. The side panel allows you to watch a thread while you continue another conversation. It also puts together an above average notification system, where at a glance you can see if there is no new content, new content, or your name mentioned. It allows you to ignore slack without risk of missing somebody shouting for you.

On the contrary, I find Slack threads to be very annoying for discovering/stumbling upon conversations. Your whole team could be having a new discussion within a thread and you'd never know unless you participated in the thread previously or somebody @'s you. Compare that to more IRC-like discussion where each message is posted to the channel. Sure, you may end up with contextual issues reminiscent of the IRC days, b…

I've used Slack competitor Flowdock in the past which did the more "elevated" approach to threads. Rather than "hide" them from the main branch of a channel, the main branch had every message in the top level and you could collapse to a thread view if you wanted to read it in isolation.

In my experience, the main problem here was that people regularly lost sight that a conversation even was in a thread. So they'd post their response unthreaded right in line. Now the people in the thread view can't see it, but if you were in the main channel it still looked just fine (after all they were one after the other). If it was a nascent threaded conversation (like 2 or so posts only), often the thread was just abandoned and everything was done top level. For bigger threads where you caught after the fact it was a threaded, people would either delete and repost or would just duplicate their post over into the thread again (which means it appears twice in the main channel). The worst offenders were people who refused to thread so even if it was humming along fine they'd just post their response inline always (and repeatedly).

Don't know if I have a particular point there other than both had tradeoffs. I do find that the Slack thread updates disappearing seems to be less frequent of an issue and the threading problems in the alternative were near constant. I think Slack's issue would be largely a nonissue if viewing a thread "subscribed" you to it so you could see updates without needing to post. Maybe reactions are a workaround too. It's fairly easy to unsubscribe if one's blowing you up. Subscribing to all threads regardless seems to reduce some of their usefulness and that's the current solution I believe.

Re: Slack is down for some users

#124

Post by rst »

parkingrift wrote: post #73
anderspitman wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting. We've played with a couple integrations but don't use any. What sort of org are you in? We're an academic bioinformatics lab with 15-20 people.

Not OP, but we have numerous integrations. Technical, corporate, and fun. GitHub, Jira, Status Hero, Outlook Calendar, Asana, Conference Booking, polls, "water cooler" type apps, and more. I actually can't get a comprehensive list right now because Slack is down... We could make do without many of these integrations if we had to but the integrations and webhooks are THE killer feature to me. Chat is easy to solve.

FWIW, some of the hosted Slack alternatives, like Zulip, support at least versions of some of these -- see their integrations page here: https://zulip.com/integrations/

What would be ideal from this perspective would be if they could make the integrations somehow code-compatible with Slack, but that's tough. For example, Zulip's topic system is, IMHO, vastly superior to Slack's threads, but every public message is under some topic (within a stream -- there are two levels, not one), everything posting a public message has to supply one, and that alone might make it difficult to reuse a Slack integration unaltered.

Re: Slack is down for some users

#125

Post by rst »

tomxor wrote: post #51
bengale wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've got to nail the integrations. Anytime moving to slack alternatives is brought up with people I work with, it always comes down to everything integrating with slack.

^This We aren't even particularly dependent on slack, but the convenience of a few basic integrations like google calendar make moving to Discord or anything else a non starter. The integrations, and chat itself needs an open protocol, otherwise it's just going to be more and more of slack in the future.

Well, WRT Google Calendar in particular: https://www.discalbot.com/

I understand that's one of at least several, and that if Slack isn't actively making trouble, looking for alternatives is a switching cost that may itself be prohibitive -- but if Slack is becoming really troublesome, it might be easier than you think.

Re: Slack is down for some users

#127

Post by kazen44 »

lima wrote: post #113
jjice wrote: post #107

Whenever I see a product this large having an outage (a lot recently, especially with Facebook, GCP, and AWS), I can only think of how stressful it must be for whoever needs to fix it. I've been on the other side of the outage before, albeit with a much smaller product, but lord was that stressful. Thinking about the random engineers that are stressed out and thinking that they could be fired for this, even if the ca…

In a well-managed engineering organization, it shouldn't be stressful. Sense of urgency, sure, but stress is typically only making things worse.

stressing out and panicing is the worst thing you can do in this situation.

usually, keep your head cool and focus on the problem at hand.

This is also the reason why engineering/operations should be seperate from customer communications. The people who are fixing the issue should not also be the ones doing the communication with the outside world.

Re: Slack is down for some users

#128

Post by skeeter2020 »

danhab99 wrote: post #13

My whole team doesn't want to work today because we'll have to use MS Teams as a backup. Rip

This seems at best a funny tweet. They're both just tools and frankly terrible in terms of "getting work done". This seems like a great time to go heads down on a deep task and if you really need to contact someone send an email or even phone them.

Re: Slack is down for some users

#129

Post by aantix »

jjice wrote: post #107

Whenever I see a product this large having an outage (a lot recently, especially with Facebook, GCP, and AWS), I can only think of how stressful it must be for whoever needs to fix it. I've been on the other side of the outage before, albeit with a much smaller product, but lord was that stressful. Thinking about the random engineers that are stressed out and thinking that they could be fired for this, even if the ca…

I often thought of the Zoom engineers on-call during the pandemic shutdown.

Talk about being on center stage..

Re: Slack is down for some users

#130

Post by speeder »

Slack was down to me, and now that it is back, it is begging me to subscribe to use paid features, with the nag screens blocking my view of important stuff.

I guess it was down so they could do this crappy update.

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