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Slack is down

status.slack.com

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Re: Slack is down

#721

Post by throwaway201103 »

dheera wrote: post #711
welterde wrote: post #672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, but what if you're taking a few days off to backpack in the wilderness with no signal while it goes down? Who deals with the downtime?

Who deals with the downtime if any other on-premises system goes down?

If you are running networks and software on site, and they are business-critical, you have people and a plan for this. Or you don't, and suffer the consequences.

Re: Slack is down

#722

Post by networkimprov »

megous wrote: post #693
networkimprov wrote: post #689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's largely overlooked that the success of Slack & MS Teams is partly due to the cybercrime portal that email has become. IOW, you don't get phished in your org's Slack chats. To prevent phishing, any chat service will suffice; an open protocol isn't necessary, as you don't intend to engage with ppl outside your org. The essential problem IMO is how to replace SMTP. No one has proposed and implemented an alternative…

Why would you replace it? Will not disabling all public un-authenticated submissions on your mail server suffice? You can also prevent delivery to outside world (and error out on submission so that users are notified) if you really like. Result will be your own private mail server. And you can keep using all the normal MUA's on desktop and mobile.

Changing your SMTP server configuration that way would break things, so the question is whether to set up a new, company-internal SMTP server, and give your employees new addresses there. But that won't quickly stop the phishing, because your ppl still need to get email via the public network from clients and suppliers.

Setting up a new server isn't easy unless you hire an outside service provider, and if you're willing to do that, Slack et al offer a nicer UX than the well known email/webmail clients.

Orgs with sufficient IT resources commonly do run internal SMTP servers.

Re: Slack is down

#723

Post by megous »

networkimprov wrote: post #722
megous wrote: post #693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you replace it? Will not disabling all public un-authenticated submissions on your mail server suffice? You can also prevent delivery to outside world (and error out on submission so that users are notified) if you really like. Result will be your own private mail server. And you can keep using all the normal MUA's on desktop and mobile.

Changing your SMTP server configuration that way would break things, so the question is whether to set up a new, company-internal SMTP server, and give your employees new addresses there. But that won't quickly stop the phishing, because your ppl still need to get email via the public network from clients and suppliers. Setting up a new server isn't easy unless you hire an outside service provider, and if you're will…

I meant that as a suggestion compared to designing a new protocol.

Re: Slack is down

#724

Post by PhilippGille »

thesuitonym wrote: post #681
pachico wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can hardly see those as alternatives to Slack. Maybe https://mattermost.com/ is what you were thinking about?

Matrix with Element (Riot) as the front-end is pretty close. It does what slack does, it's just not very good. XMPP is arguable. It can be a Slack alternative, if you stitch enough other servers on top of it. Personally, I don't think XMPP will ever be more than chat, but some of its adherents believe differently. Mattermost is certainly not what I meant. That's just trading one Slack for another.

This thread is about a Slack outage, which you have no control over. Mattermost and similar software is self-hosted, which of course doesn't mean you're getting 100% uptime, but you have (more) control over it.

Re: Slack is down

#725

Post by kevinqi »

jhgg wrote: post #668
013a wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At 12:00pm EDT on a workday: Minecraft official server: 190k online users. | Fortnite official server: 180k online users. | Valorant official server: 170k online users. | Jet's Dream World (community): 130k online users. | CallMeCarson server (YouTuber): 100k online users. | Call of Duty official server: 90k online users. | Rust (the game) official discord: 80k online users. | League of Legends official server: 60k o…

Our secret sauce is Elixir/BEAM and Rust :) Well for the real time side, I can't tell you how big a boon it's been to build our platform on top of Elixir/BEAM. Hands down the best runtime / VM for the job - and a big big secret to our success. Where we couldn't get BEAM fast enough - we lean on rust and embed it into the VM via NIFs. 2021 is the year of rust - with the async ecosystem continuing to mature (tokio 1.0…

Assuming this is real - very interesting read, thanks for sharing.

Re: Slack is down

#726

Post by holler »

If anyone is looking for an alternative way for fast and seamless chat with colleagues, friends, or strangers, you're welcome to check out Sqwok (https://sqwok.im)

Although it's built as a live news discussion site versus a team messaging app, the topics can be about anything, are public, and inviting others is as simple as sharing the url of the post (mobile/desktop web).

Example (reposted this hn post to sqwok): https://sqwok.im/p/Q3-1AZFLCSpjew

Re: Slack is down

#727

Post by jaywalk »

mey wrote: post #718
jaywalk wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it went down fully and I had the Windows client open, it went to a page that basically said "Slack is down, we don't know why, try restarting and see if that fixes it. Here's the status page." It would be nice if they could fix it so that a fresh start also goes to that page, at the very least.

How do you have the Slack app installed? I currently have it installed via the Windows/Microsoft Store, and I suspect that is a significant part of the problem.

Direct download from their site.

Re: Slack is down

#728

Post by yreg »

dijit wrote: post #101
tedmiston wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have more info like services, regions etc? I see all green checks on the AWS Status page.

> I see all green checks on the AWS Status page. I'm sure you know this already, but that status page isn't worth the cycles on your CPU, you would be better served asking the toaster if AWS is functioning properly than checking that status page.

If one's smart toaster depends on AWS one might very well do that.

Re: Slack is down

#729

Post by tehjoker »

jethro_tell wrote: post #532
xibalba wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One nation is currently operating concentration camps and arrests and seizes the property of prominent citizens who criticize the government. Are you sure that's an equivalence you want to draw.

yes, I remember when I got my trump kidney from a poor anti-fascist liberal. /s America is fucked up, that doesn't mean that other countries aren't also fucked up or aren't doing worse things with the data they collect.

Yea, but you live here and so you should think about the implications of this for yourself and your countrymen and not through the lens of international competition. That is a distraction.

Essentially, the China case proved Zoom is willing to cooperate with a nation state. The US is the nation state we live in, Zoom is HQ'd here. Therefore, the risk to us is high.

As an aside, the organ harvesting idea comes from the Fulan Gong, who are similar to Chinese Scientologists. It is not clear to me that their claims are accurate.

Re: Slack is down

#730

Post by Macha »

blntechie wrote: post #332

I have always had this fantasy thinking of what happens when outages of one of these major service never come back online i.e. in this outage Slack loses info of all the accounts, users, messages etc. How would people react? What would engineers do to recover? I always found that idea fascinating. Imagine Google saying tomorrow that they lost all the accounts and emails. What kind of impact the world will have?

Happened to Ma.gnolia, which was the number 2 bookmarking site behind Del.icio.us in that era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnolia

HN comments at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=487497

The site relaunched a month later and shut down for good a year after that

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