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Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

status.slack.com

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Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#191
post #85
post #57

Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but "We've received word that all workspaces are having troubles connecting to Slack." makes it sound like their internal monitoring didn't catch whatever is causing this. I was personally experiencing issues for about 20-30 minutes before the status update was posted.

I think that is just the tongue in cheek language they like to use.

Yeah, it's really funny and ironic when you cost customers money!

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook quite often breaks their stuff and/or goes down, however, their outages usually last for just a few minutes.

They recently pushed out an iOS update for Messenger that crashed to springboard any time you tried to resume it from background. It took a couple of hours to get a new build up, plus however long for affected users to all install the new version. I'd love to hear the story of how that made it through testing.

What does "crashed to springboard" mean?

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#193
post #33

You know how much of the community uses one messaging system when 15 minutes after it going down, it has over 40 points on the front page! This says a lot about how it's a single point of failure in modern company comms. It's even worrying to think about how some users probably have production-dependent (dare I postulate it) workflows in Slack that get crippled by its outage... ITT: Chat about decentralisation that w…

I worked at an open source company where they hosted their own IRC server. There are OSS alternatives to Slack and I wonder if that company has tried to adopt any of them. This all goes back to one basic fact: The Cloud is Someone Else's Computer(tm). If your hosted Confluence or Jira is down, you can go walk over to your IT team and they'll be like, "Yea we know. We broke something. We're working on it." If you're u…

Let's say the self hosted chat app does go down. Now someone has to fix it. Someone who probably has something better to do. In a cloud hosted solution, the person in charge of fixing your computer doesn't work for you.

My experience with self hosted solutions is that they go down way more often and take longer to fix than cloud solutions.

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#194
post #188

Just as we sign a £100K+/annum contact with them... At least it happened before we've migrated.

There are so many open source solutions, Mattermost, Rocketchat, etc, why are companies willing to pay $100k/yr for Slack? What was the defining feature that others didn't have? Even Discord feels like it has far more features than Slack.

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#195
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense, but you're probably doing it wrong

You just gave a good argument of why s/he should use Slack. Yeah s/he might be doing it wrong, but so what? One should focus on core business, not system administration.

Yup, every time one of the popular centralized XaaS platforms go down, there's always the snarky "Heh, well my stuff is self-hosted...", and they are always the types that have no idea how to value their time.

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#196
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Curious why you got burned with IRC client UX given the multitude of clients available for it.

Technical people who haven't used IRC can barely figure out IRC their first time using it. Trying to sell IRC to a company would be hilarious. Bob in Accounting getting on IRC and feeling comfortable with it's UX?

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They recently pushed out an iOS update for Messenger that crashed to springboard any time you tried to resume it from background. It took a couple of hours to get a new build up, plus however long for affected users to all install the new version. I'd love to hear the story of how that made it through testing.

What does "crashed to springboard" mean?

springboard is essentially the Finder application on the iPhone - so crashed to springboard means crashed to home screen, basically.

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#198

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.

I'm wondering the same thing. I chose this morning to soft-launch my side-project/startup and sent out the sign-up link to my e-mail list. Of course, it's AWS Cognito-based, was working yesterday, but failed for the new users. Great timing! Phone support said they are looking into some outages (even though the status page is all green).

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it's a single point of failure, but so what? I don't particularly care whether other organizations fail at the same time as I do, I just care whether I fail. Hosting my own chat system does not solve that problem. In fact, it may make it worse because then I have to worry about system administration, and Slack probably has more expertise on that. It's likely that they can fix this problem for all customers faster…

I think it's inexcusable for a chat program to go down in 2018. * your hdd failed? Use a raid * your power went out? Use a UPS * your DNS went down? Use a fallback (slack2) * your whole datacenter flooded? Good thing you have multiple replicated cloud instances that seamlessly take over See, these are the issues that "the cloud" was supposed to solve. Not give us the same problems as before, just with a recurring bil…

>slack is the most trivial software you can think of

This is like saying that food service at 30k feet in a passenger airline is trivial because all the server has to do is walk up and down a narrow aisle handing out food from a cart.

Since "you see no reason this service can't be nearly as reliable as life support firmware", one of two things must be true:

1) You know something nobody else knows. In which case great, you've stumbled on a huge opportunity to go put your knowledge to work and get stupendously rich by outcompeting this "trivial" software company. Get to it, genius!

or

2) The reason you "see no reason..." is that you're unaware of one or more relevant facts.

Which of these do you think is more probable?

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