Who knew Salesforce could work this fast :p
They had the same issue 3 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24687957
Slack is down
41–50 of 840 posts
Re: Slack is down
#42These events seem to be happening almost on a monthly basis now. IRC was never this unreliable and at least with netsplits it was obvious what had happened because you'd see the clients disconnect. IME messages just fail to send with Slack, then you can retry but they're not properly idempotent and you end up sending the messages twice. It's really poor.
To be fair, IRC doesn't do a lot of things Slack does. Where is the logging and audit trails, access control, search, etc.
Re: Slack is down
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Status pages are probably manually updated. You don't want a false positive/bug in your monitoring to affect your public metrics.
Fair enough. Though I'm not sure how I'd feel about the whole world knowing about my service's outage before I do.
I'm positive that they have internal monitoring, and probably knew about the issues well before they decided to manually update their status page to reflect the issue. Manually updating the status page does not equal no monitoring, after all.
Re: Slack is down
#44How many more outages until all trust is eroded and competing services differentiate themselves on the basis of uptime?
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 should start counting against whatever SLA they advertise.
The underlying problem here is that apparently everyone lies about uptime, so if you don't, that looks bad to potential customers. I fear that we will have to push for some legal regulation if we want accurate data, and ... people will probably be opposed to that.
Re: Slack is down
#45I’m just enjoying it while it lasts
Re: Slack is down
#46Could it be the obvious? Everyone signing on / loading slack clients at the same time?
then wouldn't this happen every monday morning?
Re: Slack is down
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're asking genuinely then I can tell you my experience when I was part of a SaaS shop, though the times have changed a lot and "my metric is not necessarily your metric". But it was roughly "one large impact a month, for six months", with large caveats that upper management for whatever company had to be working with the product during that month. Large companies don't care if X service went out during the nigh…
> But migrating everything is _so painful_ This is a key point is the popularity amongst VCs in investing in B2B SaaS. I take their (and your) word for it. But honestly, I don't actually understand this. Why is migration so hard?
Medium sized team on Slack. We'd need to move ~60 full time in-house employees, ~10 remote contractors who aren't on other comms channels, ~20 infrequent freelance contributors who may not check messages often, ~5 custom bots and apps, and ~15 3rd party integrations (of which some won't support any given choice of alternative).
This is not to mention the fact that half our staff aren't hugely technical, so have actively _learnt_ how to use Slack and it's features around notification control (things that may come "naturally" to the tech-savvy crowd on HN), @-things, bots, etc, and they would need to re-learn a new tool that is going to work in a different way.
This would be a substantial effort for us, and we're a small company. Are there ways to materially minimise this cost?
Re: Slack is down
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're asking genuinely then I can tell you my experience when I was part of a SaaS shop, though the times have changed a lot and "my metric is not necessarily your metric". But it was roughly "one large impact a month, for six months", with large caveats that upper management for whatever company had to be working with the product during that month. Large companies don't care if X service went out during the nigh…
> But migrating everything is _so painful_ This is a key point is the popularity amongst VCs in investing in B2B SaaS. I take their (and your) word for it. But honestly, I don't actually understand this. Why is migration so hard?
>Why is migration so hard?
Why would anyone make it easy
Re: Slack is down
#49oh good, it's not just me and my already bad first day of the year... is it too early to start drinking?
> is it too early to start drinking?
Depends on the timezone you're in, though one could theoretically cite a disparity between physical and mental/emotional/temporal time zones...
Re: Slack is down
#50How many more outages until all trust is eroded and competing services differentiate themselves on the basis of uptime?
I wouldn't be shocked if businesses saw increased productivity during these.
I have less of an excuse not to be more personally productive, but I can't help anyone else (easily) if my primary method of communication is down. Not only because it's harder to contact you, but also because it's impossible for you to just ask in a channel and have me notice you.
There's also this perverse incentive to Slack all the things. Lots of CI notifications are sent through it. Some org processes are implemented as workflows. There's been talk of how wonderful it would be to hook up tasking and work tracking to slash commands. I and others often use Slack instead of the 'official' tool to video call each other.
An outage like this is still really disruptive. It's not like everyone realizes what's going on immediately or at the same time; we have backup tools, but our turn radius is pretty wide. Some of us can't even communicate effectively without memes, too, and backup tools don't have a giphy integration.
EDIT: Do your CI integrations fail if Slack can't be contacted? Do those failures fail your pipeline? Whoops!