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Slack is down

status.slack.com

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Re: Slack is down

#671

Post by darkwater »

dheera wrote: post #661
thesuitonym wrote: post #634

I'd like to take this moment to mention self-hosted, open source, and federated alternatives like XMPP and Matrix. I'd like to, but unfortunately I don't feel like I can in good faith. Matrix is woefully immature, and suffers from a lot of issues, but I think is closer to being a functional Slack/Discord alternative. XMPP is much more mature, and works very well for chat, but doesn't have a nice package that does all…

> self-hosted How often is Slack/Discord down? I mean it's not perfect, but I really honestly don't think I could match their uptime by self-hosting, as well as more on-call rotations for something that's not core product. I very much prefer that for something that isn't core product, if it goes down I need to do exactly nothing for it to come back up, and that the engineers at Slack will be starting to work on it li…

This is a tale SaaS vendors (which have strong presence in online tech communities like HN because they are software companies) sold very well, and it's probably true for many small startups, but for medium sized companies managing their own platform for something like Slack is completely doable and you will not have those big downtimes compared to Slack. Sure, you have to dedicate time and resources to it, and obviously is not "core business" although a chat platform is a pretty important component in an online company.

Re: Slack is down

#672

Post by welterde »

dheera wrote: post #661
thesuitonym wrote: post #634

I'd like to take this moment to mention self-hosted, open source, and federated alternatives like XMPP and Matrix. I'd like to, but unfortunately I don't feel like I can in good faith. Matrix is woefully immature, and suffers from a lot of issues, but I think is closer to being a functional Slack/Discord alternative. XMPP is much more mature, and works very well for chat, but doesn't have a nice package that does all…

> self-hosted How often is Slack/Discord down? I mean it's not perfect, but I really honestly don't think I could match their uptime by self-hosting, as well as more on-call rotations for something that's not core product. I very much prefer that for something that isn't core product, if it goes down I need to do exactly nothing for it to come back up, and that the engineers at Slack will be starting to work on it li…

I would be surprised if you couldn't match or exceed slacks uptime running whatever alternative you want (IRC, mattermost, rocketchat, etc.) on a random dedicated server.

Hardware is quite reliable these days. And updates can be scheduled to be at a convenient time for the team.

Re: Slack is down

#673

Post by jll29 »

Just a note to say "thanks" to the Slack team for the uptime when Slack is not down, it's been incredibly useful as a tool to me when other enterprise systems (Teams, Outlook & co.) have been down over the last couple of years, and especially throughout 2020.

Somehow Slack is very resilient in general. I also appreciate its UX/UI being far superior to Teams.

Ultimately, the cloud is often a single point of failure that companies become over-dependent. So I'd favour a free (as in freedom) and open source self-hosted/deployed alternative if there was one (even if it was from Slack and for pay). I agree with most on here that there isn't such a thing yet - but it's well worth building! So those of you out there who are considering implementing "yet another text editor", maybe this is something to work on.

Re: Slack is down

#674

Post by dang »

All: large threads are paginated, especially today when our server is steaming. Click More at the bottom of the thread for more comments, or like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25632346&p=2

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25632346&p=3

(Yes, these comments are an annoying workaround. Their hidden agenda is to goad me into finishing some performance improvements we're badly in need of.)

Re: Slack is down

#675

Post by korethr »

Well, they're mostly back up now. I'm curious to see what will come of the postmortem, and if that report will be made public, even if only in part.

Re: Slack is down

#676

Post by lallysingh »

spicyramen wrote: post #663
thesuitonym wrote: post #634

I'd like to take this moment to mention self-hosted, open source, and federated alternatives like XMPP and Matrix. I'd like to, but unfortunately I don't feel like I can in good faith. Matrix is woefully immature, and suffers from a lot of issues, but I think is closer to being a functional Slack/Discord alternative. XMPP is much more mature, and works very well for chat, but doesn't have a nice package that does all…

Facebook and other vendors killed XMPP, we lived in a non federated world in Enterprise and consumer. No interest of companies to change this

Spam killed xmpp

Re: Slack is down

#677

Post by deathanatos »

sofixa wrote: post #277
overlordalex wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly their uptime for the quarter is still 100% despite a full-red dashboard. I wonder if that's something that is calculated only after an outage is resolved

Well until the issue is resolved you can't know how long you've been down for, so you can't actually update the uptime.

Well, now the outage is marked as resolved. And the uptime is still "100%".

Re: Slack is down

#678

Post by xeromal »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #375
lawrjone wrote: post #336

Having been in this situation before, with a totally-down-and-not-coming-back-up outage of a payments system, I really feel for their incident response team. I'll take this moment to remind everyone of their human tendency to read meaning into random events. There's no evidence to suggest New Year traffic has caused this, and outages like this can happen in spite of professional and competent preparation. Hugops for…

> I'll take this moment to remind everyone of their human tendency to read meaning into random events. There's no evidence to suggest New Year traffic has caused this, and outages like this can happen in spite of professional and competent preparation. On the one hand, sure we don't specifically know what's going on. On the other hand, it's the first Monday in the new year and they went down shortly after the start o…

Another likely scenario is that they a deployment that was risky that they waited to push until after the holidays.

Re: Slack is down

#679

Post by erik_seaberg »

ThePadawan wrote: post #373
exhaze wrote: post #89

When I was at Uber, we noticed that most incidents are directly caused by human actions that modify the state of the system. Therefore, a large "backlog" of human actions that modify the system state have a much higher chance of causing an incident. My bet is that this incident is caused by a big release after a post-holiday "code freeze".

This is one of the original concepts why to go capital-A Agile. Make smaller releases more often, so at least if something breaks, it's (hopefully) something small, and least it's easier to trace. (I'm not making a statement if that's good or bad or if it works or whatever. Please don't read an opinion into it.)

This. If you roll many changes into a single deployment, you don’t know which change broke what. But if you have two or three weeks of commits waiting, it’s hard to do otherwise.

Re: Slack is down

#680

Post by Cederfjard »

brlewis wrote: post #670
VectorLock wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN's tolerance for jokes and sarcasm is extremely low.

I'm not sure about that. I feel like I get more upvotes from sarcasm and jokes than from insight. In this instance, I think it's because when people hear something dumb said seriously in real life, they're not going to readily recognize online that it's a joke.

Yeah, Poe’s law applies here. That’s definitely something someone less informed might say in earnest.
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